


The Winters Cannot Fade Her

by lady_ragnell



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Snow White Fusion, F/F, Hopeful Ending, Near Death Experiences, See Notes for further warnings, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 04:51:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15811743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Éponine was often told the story of her birth, when she was small, before her parents took the kingdom and lost interest in their eldest child. Azelma was the first born royal, and Gavroche the first prince, but Éponine was the first child, and hoped-for.When her mother felt the labor pains, the wind was whistling through the treetops, ice freezing on the roads and clouding the windows, the world so cold it hurt to breathe.“I hope,” her mother said then, looking out the window, like a wish she wanted to come true, like a spell, “that the child is as fierce as this storm, and as wild as the wind.”A Snow White AU.





	The Winters Cannot Fade Her

**Author's Note:**

> Written alongside **samyazaz** , who took the same concept and ship and wrote Cosette as Snow White. Check her version, [blood red fruit and poison's kiss](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15820731), out!
> 
>  **Warnings/Content Notes:** this being a Snow White AU and a story that deals with the Thenardiers, it gets dark in places. There are multiple instances of a viewpoint character near death (from frostbite/hypothermia, poison, asphyxiation, and magic). Violence, mildly explicit, that leads to minor character death. References to child abuse, emotional/psychological, that the Thenardiers visited on their children and on Cosette. Imprisonment, and references to what amounts to psychological torture. And last, while there isn't suicidal ideation in the common usage of the term, there are several points where Éponine considers her death to be the lesser of several evils.
> 
> Title from "Little Green," by Joni Mitchell.

Éponine was often told the story of her birth, when she was small, before her parents took the kingdom and lost interest in their eldest child. Azelma was the first born royal, and Gavroche the first prince, but Éponine was the first child, and hoped-for.

When her mother felt the labor pains, the wind was whistling through the treetops, ice freezing on the roads and clouding the windows, the world so cold it hurt to breathe.

“I hope,” her mother said then, looking out the window, like a wish she wanted to come true, like a spell, “that the child is as fierce as this storm, and as wild as the wind.”

Of course, they thought then that she would be a son.

Still, they called her “Snow” sometimes, until she became a princess and too important for such little nicknames.

It's been a dozen years or more now since she heard the name, but it's the one her mother uses when she calls Éponine in for an audience. “I have a task for you, Snow,” says her mother, and there's a strange light in her eyes, a fervor. In the throne next to her, Éponine's father is toying with the edge of his robe, staring off to the side. It's of no importance. She's of no importance. Off to one side, Azelma is standing, smiling a little like she hopes Éponine is going to be given a treat.

“A task?” She's never been trained as an heir or as a royal wife, never given anything to do but watch her siblings and wander the palace endlessly, restlessly.

“There have been rumors of a beast. You'll go with a huntsman to investigate those rumors.” She beckons someone forward, and Éponine tries not to flinch. Of course it's Valjean and Cosette, petty cruelty to Éponine and Cosette both, Cosette because there's no reason she should ever want to spend time with Éponine, and Éponine because she wants to see her too much.

“Your Majesty,” says Éponine. It's been years since she called her mother anything else. “I know nothing of beasts or hunting.” If she were braver, she might say that her mother is well-known as a witch, the force that conquered a kingdom, and that she could easily kill a beast, perhaps from where she sits. But it suits the queen for her people to forget that she knows spellcraft, and Éponine won't dare to gainsay her that far. Only enough to excuse Cosette and her father, if she can, from having to deal with unwanted company even if they do have to go out into the cold on a dangerous fool's errand.

“You'll learn.” Valjean isn't looking at Éponine either. Both he and Cosette look like the queen has just handed their deaths down from her throne, and the queen is still smiling as she speaks. “Dear Cosette, you'll teach her, won't you? You've learned so much in your apprenticeship.” She takes a vicious satisfaction in that, in Cosette being raised by a huntsman when she was once a ward of the royal family. “I trust you'll be good teachers.”

Éponine wants to say no, ask if her mother has decided at last to get her heir out of the way, get biddable, popular Azelma in her place, but she's not foolish enough to bring that up in the open. Instead, she inclines her head, and dares a glance to look at Azelma, now that she's thinking of her. Her smile has frozen on her face. “I'm sure we will. When will we leave?”

“Tomorrow.” A thin smile. “Dress warmly, my dear. It's supposed to snow.”

“Of course.” She curtsies and looks sidelong at Cosette and Valjean. For a second, Cosette looks back, something desperate and strange in her expression, and then it's over, their eyes sliding apart under the weight of everything they have and haven't been to each other. Éponine's stomach turns over in a frenzy of worry and nervous anticipation, but the latter is foolish, and she pushes it back. “If you'll excuse me, I'll pack some supplies.”

Her mother smiles.

*

Gavroche finds her in her rooms that night, though they're locked and she certainly didn't let him in. He's always had a talent for that. “I heard you're going away.”

“From the rafters or some secret passageway, I imagine?” Éponine asks, discarding a coat for being too fine to be practical in the forest, even if it's warm. “Not for long.”

“She's planning something.”

Éponine sighs, picks up a good wool scarf that should keep her warm enough while looking for a beast that likely doesn't exist. “It doesn't matter. I have to go either way. You stay here and be …” She won't tell him to be good. It won't make any difference. And telling him to be safe is stupid, when in the end, it isn't his choice. “Be smart,” she finally says.

“Don't say that like you're saying goodbye. If you disappear, I'm coming after you.”

“I'm going with Valjean and Cosette. They … it could be much more dangerous. And you won't. You'll stay here, and keep your eyes open. Look after Azelma, too.”

“You think something's going to happen to you,” he says, accusatory.

Of course she does. Her mother taking a sudden interest in her can only be a bad thing. “What could I do about it?”

“Run away. Fight. I'd help.”

Éponine doesn't put her arms around him. They've never been affectionate that way, never quite dared or cared to be. “I know you would,” she says instead. “I can defend myself. And like I said, Valjean and Cosette are trustworthy, as people here go.” Gavroche doesn't look convinced, just mulish. He didn't know Cosette as a child, doesn't trust her goodness the way Éponine perhaps foolishly does. Everything about Cosette turns her into a fool. “You need to stay here, either way. I mean it, you can't come after us, no matter what.”

“We have to do something someday.”

“Even kings and queens die,” says Éponine. He still doesn't look happy, but he sits there in silence while she packs the rest of what she needs, and hugs her quickly around the waist before he leaves, too fast for her to return the embrace.

*

The air is bitingly cold as Éponine leaves the palace with Cosette and Valjean the next morning. They're both pale and weary, buried in layers just like she is against the dangers of winter, and neither of them says much as they follow the paths to the forest that will lead them, they're told, to a beast.

Éponine may have gone to the forest as a child, before her parents took the throne, but never as deep as they travel, silent and slow, throughout the day. They take paths that Valjean seems to know well, into the deepest parts of the forest, the ones that aren't cultivated or harvested, just left to themselves. She can hear birds and beasts, the occasional crack of a dry branch, but nothing comes close enough to hunt, and there's no sign of anything dangerous.

Valjean is the one to call a stop when they're all well past weary and night is creeping over the forest. Cosette, to Éponine's surprise, pleads against a stop, acts as though she'd like to push on for the whole night. “We must rest sometime,” Éponine says, the only thing she's said all day. Her voice is rusty, throat scraped dry from the cold. “I'll fetch wood if you set up the tents.”

“Of course,” says Valjean, solemn, and Cosette meets his eyes, looking wild and strange with it, when Éponine has only seen her gentle, no matter what was thrown at her.

If they have things to discuss, Éponine's presence will only hamper them, so she strays a little, picking up dead branches that are dry enough to burn, loading herself down.

When she hears a twig snap behind her, she freezes, and for a moment she half-hopes it's the beast. Instead, Cosette coughs, and Éponine turns. Cosette looks wretched, and she's holding a knife. To her own surprise, Éponine smiles. “Am I the beast, then?”

Cosette swallows. The glint of the knife in the last light of day proves that her hands are shaking. “She said that if we don't come back with your heart, she'll take mine or Father's instead.”

Éponine presses her hand to her chest, smile falling off her face as fast as it came. “I thought she might want me dead, but my heart? What good could that do her, besides proof?”

“She didn't say much. Only that she wants your heart. She said—she said a woman's only true immortality is through her children.”

They took the palace through magic, when Éponine was young. She's always known that. Terrible magic, blood magic, the kind that comes with a price. A heart might not be much to blink at, after all that. A heart, and the reason her mother has never bothered to train any of her children as heirs, and the reason her father has showed no more affection to his children than he might to a prize hog he would have butchered come the right time. And if it isn't just her … Éponine bolts upright, from strangely languid about the thought of her own death to terrified all at once. “Gavroche and Azelma. You have to get them out, or the same thing will happen to them. You have to save them. Azelma won't want to go with you, but let Gavroche convince her.”

“I … I expected you to at least ask, to have another solution,” says Cosette. She's still holding her knife like she'll use it, but she looks lost now, and Éponine could hate her mother all over again for using this to ruin Cosette if she had the energy to spare from her terror for her brother and sister. She's always hated Cosette, and always hated that Éponine hasn't in years, since she realized she her parents are.

Though she never thought they were this bad.

“Why would you? What solution am I supposed to have? I can't conjure a heart out of these woods—that's your job. You're a hunter, after all.” Éponine squares her shoulders. “I'll have your word of honor. You and your father live, you save Azelma and Gavroche. Help them out of the palace, find them safety if you can.”

“I am a hunter,” says Cosette, like she only just now believes it. Éponine knows how much her father tries to protect her, was witness to her parents making a mockery of that concern, the way he tried to find her any occupation but the one he chose and the way she's always insisted on following him. Éponine never asked her reasons, and it seems stupid to do so now. “If a hunter can't conjure a heart out of the woods, who can?”

The firewood is weighing Éponine down, straining her arms, but she doesn't let go, and she doesn't move. “Whatever you're thinking, be sure of it.”

“I am sure. Why should she know what a woman's heart looks like as opposed to a boar's, or a deer's? As long as it isn't too big or too small, what reason would she have to know?” Cosette meets her eyes, with no hesitation and no worry, and Éponine's stomach twists with Cosette's concern for her. “We can do this.”

“And if she finds out? You'll die or your father will.”

“We can find a way out by then.” Neither of them mentions the fact that Cosette talks about it like it's an eventuality.

“And Gavroche and Azelma?”

Cosette hesitates. “I'll try. I doubt she'll let me near them, but I'll try.” She looks over her shoulder. “My father doesn't want to risk one of us getting hurt, especially not me. He would hate himself until the end of his days, but he would do it. That's why I'm going to take the firewood and you're going to run.”

Éponine clutches the wood tighter, for no reason she can fathom. “And go where? And do what? I'll die in these woods, and you won't even have the benefit of my heart to keep you alive. I may as well die warm and not starving and give you the chance to save your own life and those of my siblings.”

There's a terrible pity on Cosette's face, and Éponine remembers being a child and making a mockery of Cosette when she was brought low instead of being generous or helping her. She's done her best to provide small kindnesses and smiles in the past few years, but they can't outweigh that. Cosette's willingness to help now shames her, and Éponine is deflecting in the face of it, all but asking for death just because she can't imagine what her life could be now. “People live in the forest,” Cosette finally says, too gentle. “My father spent time here, and he's always said that if we can ever get free, we'll come back to it together. Find them. Ask for help. There are kingdoms on the other side of the forest too, where you could disappear forever.”

“I can't disappear until Gavroche and Azelma are safe. But I can … I can try to find those people.”

“Then you need to run.”

She has a knife. She has her pack, with some rations, flint and tinder, a few layers of warmth. Her bedroll, the tents, everything else, are at the camp with Valjean, who would kill her to save Cosette and hate every second of the murder. Cosette wants to spare him the pain, or the choice—Éponine does believe he might choose not to kill her, but then he would want all of them to stay in the forest, and her mother's army would be after all of them, and Azelma and Gavroche would be as good as dead. And if he doesn't choose to leave her alive, she wants to spare Cosette the murder or the sight of it.

There should be something to say, before she runs into the forest and leaves her whole life behind. She should remind Cosette of her siblings again, should tell her not to come after her, or to come find her and help her plot a revolution she has no idea how to start. Éponine was never raised to be queen, because she was raised to be a sacrifice instead.

Daylight is wasting, what tiny sliver of it there is left. Cosette will have to convince Valjean of her plan, and rest before finding a beast tomorrow, a heart in exchange for Éponine's. “Thank you,” she says, and it doesn't begin to cover everything that ought to be said, but it's all she can manage. Cosette has always been strong, and kind, but this is something new, and it shames her even as it warms her.

Cosette smiles, though, like it's all she wanted to hear. “Live,” she says, “and run.”

Éponine does.

*

Éponine doesn't know the forest. She's only been in the tame woods, in the summer and on a horse, with guards around so there was little to hurt her. This forest is different, wilder. It's climbing over the trunks of monstrous trees she can't even put her arms around that have fallen to let other growing monsters take their places. The snow isn't deep only because so little can make it through the cover of branches and evergreens. She hears wolves and wonders if they're hungry with the long winter and walks with her knife clutched in her frozen hands.

She's lost. For all she knows, she could be walking straight back into her mother's power, because it's been two days and the wind and the snow mean she can't find a track to stay on. If there are people this deep in the forest, they've made themselves hard to find.

She wonders if Cosette and her father have found some beast to replace Éponine yet, if Cosette has seen Gavroche or Azelma, what the two of them thought when she didn't come back to the palace. Gavroche, at least, had suspected she might not, but she hasn't spoken to Azelma past a terse greeting in weeks.

Her whole body is stinging with cold, but she keeps stumbling forward, because to stay in one place is to give up, and she finds that somehow she can't bring herself to do that. Cosette offered her life, after all. She can't spurn that gift.

*

On the third day, when she's almost certain that frostbite has set in despite doing her best to stay warm and start fires to warm herself by whenever she could and when she's long since out of food and her stomach is aching with it, she smells cooking meat.

Éponine stumbles in the direction of the smell, even knowing that the wind could have her going in the wrong direction completely, even knowing it could be bandits more likely to meet her with weapons than warmth.

What she finds, in the end, is an empty cottage. It's warm, snow from someone's boots still melting in front of the door when her knock doesn't lead to an answer and she dares pushing inside, and there's something that smells delicious roasting over the fire. Whoever owns this house, they can't have gone far, or it's some kind of fairy cottage like she's only heard of in stories. Her parents may have conquered with magic, but Éponine doesn't know it to recognize it, especially not the good kind.

The warmth has her aching within seconds, the snow she's covered in melting second by second, and she knows within minutes she'll be soaked, dripping, and she apologizes mentally to whoever is giving her unwitting hospitality while she strips off her outer layers, taking off her boots and wincing at her frozen feet as they refuse to hold her without the support of wool and leather wrapped around them.

She crawls more than walks to the fireplace, and the heat is such a relief that despite the pain, despite knowing she's going to give someone a terrifying welcome to their own home, she falls asleep.

*

Éponine wakes to softness, and warmth, and every limb she has tingling. When she opens her eyes, there's a woman sitting next to her, dipping a cloth in a basin of water. She's beautiful, somewhat younger than Éponine's mother, and she looks strangely familiar.

She also, Éponine realizes when the world stops swimming around her, looks exhausted. “I'm sorry,” she croaks, and the woman turns to her, startled. “I didn't mean to intrude.”

“You were nearly frozen to death. You frightened us, but I'm glad you're safe—and awake.” She turns to look over her shoulder. “Simplice, our guest is awake.”

That's another woman, with a kind face, who helps Éponine roll over to face them. She's on a straw pallet that must belong to one of them, she discovers. The cottage is small enough that they almost certainly don't keep extras. “We'll have some broth for you soon, when we're sure you can swallow it. What's your name, child?”

“Éponine,” she says before she can think to give a false name, and knows from the way they both flinch that they know who she is. She struggles with her slow tongue and slower wits to find some way to soothe their worries, and all that comes out is “I'm dead.” They look at each other, then her. “The palace thinks I am, anyway. One of the hunters saved my life, but my mother wants me dead, so I couldn't go there, and I was hoping to throw myself on the mercy of someone here in the forest.”

“Why is your mother trying to kill you?” asks the first woman, and her voice is shaking.

It's been so long since Éponine has met someone who could be surprised at her mother's cruelty, and she's at a loss to explain. She still owes it to her to try, though. “Immortality, I think. I think there's magic, but I don't know more than that. Please. If you know of someone who would take someone in, I'll—I don't know how to do anything, but I'll learn, and in the spring I'll find my way to another kingdom and start over.”

They exchange another look. It's the second woman—Simplice—who speaks. “Give yourself a chance to recover a little, Éponine. Worry about the future when you haven't been wandering in the cold for however long it was. We worried you might die, or lose a few toes, but you seem to be recovering.” She looks at the first woman. “I think there's a storm coming in, but when it passes, one of us should visit—”

“I'll go. They should know.”

Éponine wonders who they're talking about, and she's ravenously hungry, but the world is swimming around her again, and sleep pulls her back under.

*

The next time she wakes, she's alone and even hungrier than before. She hasn't been moved, and the fire is burning brightly, so the women can't have gone far, wherever they are. Éponine levers herself up until she's sitting, and her hands are shaking by the time she's done. She's wearing a warm woolen shift and socks, and remembering Simplice's comment about toes, she takes them off to check. Her feet still look raw, but she thinks they'll heal.

They won't, she discovers when she tries to stand, hold her, but when she forgets about her dignity she can crawl the few paces to the table, where there's a hunk of bread waiting to be cut. She reaches up and rips a piece off, hating the weakness in her hands, and stuffs it in her mouth, only chewing because she thinks she remembers that eating quickly after a long time without will only make her sick.

She doesn't end up sick, but she does end up hiccuping, and has no idea where to find whatever water or milk they have in the house to soothe them, so by the time the woman whose name she doesn't know comes through the cottage door, she's sitting on the pallet again, frustrated and embarrassed and thirsty.

The woman sees her right away and within a second she's in front of her, not bothering to take off her warm clothes first. “There you are, we were worried. It's been nearly a day since the last time you were awake. Do you remember being awake?” Éponine nods, and hiccups. “You're safe here. My name is Fantine, and you don't have to go anywhere until you're well. You'll be safe in the forest as long as you need. I've just been to the neighbors and they agree that helping you is worth the risk.”

“Why?” she asks, her voice rasping over the word.

Fantine stands, going to a pot in one corner and ladling out a cup of what must be snowmelt. She brings it back to Éponine, and watches her gulp it down before she answers. Éponine could cry with the relief of the cold clean water, but she keeps her attention on Fantine, who must have an answer for her. “We have no love for your parents here, but that's not the real reason.”

Éponine could think of a hundred reasons why they might keep her, few of them good. She's a valuable hostage, a figurehead any rebellion would kill for, a woman who could make reparations and payments for her parents' cruelties. “Tell me, then.”

“You're a frightened young woman whose parents are trying to kill her, and you're no danger to us,” says Fantine, and it's such a flat statement that it brings Éponine up short. “So we can afford to give you the kindness you need. I have a daughter, or had one. I'd hope, if she were in danger, that someone would give her such kindness too.”

“Was it my parents?” Éponine asks, graceless, and the tightness around Fantine's mouth tells her everything she doesn't want to know. “I'm sorry. And I hope she found someone to give her kindness.”

Fantine stands and fills Éponine's cup again, then goes to the fire to stir a pot that's over it. “I imagine you're hungry, but you shouldn't eat much yet. There's broth cooking, I'll make a bowl up for you if you promise not to eat it until it's cool enough not to scald you.”

“I'll do my best. I did eat some bread when I woke up.”

Fantine spoons broth into a bowl, and Éponine's stomach rumbles, but she doesn't reach out for the bowl. She doesn't want to burn her tongue on top of recovering from exhaustion and cold. “Simplice has gone to check our traps. She'll be back soon to check on you—she knows more of healing than I do.”

Éponine nods, twisting her hands in front of her, and since Fantine doesn't seem to expect an answer, or perhaps want one, she stays quiet, only moving to take the bowl when Fantine seems to deem it safe to give to her. Éponine takes a slow sip, and it makes her flinch but doesn't burn, so she continues, sip by sip, while Fantine sits by the fire and takes up what looks like a pile of mending.

Simplice comes in with a whip of cold air not long after Éponine sets the bowl aside and starts wondering if she should be trying her luck at standing now that she has some food in her stomach. She greets Fantine quietly first, and when Fantine nods in Éponine's direction, she comes right over with a smile on her face. “You're awake, then? We were starting to be worried.”

“I'm sorry. Both for that and for taking your bed, or Fantine's. I'm well enough to sleep on the floor now.” Éponine doesn't remember ever doing so, but she'll have to.

Simplice briskly checks her hands, her feet, puts a soothing hand to Éponine's forehead to check for fever. “Another night or two won't kill us—we've switched off, these last two nights while you've been here.” Two nights, and that on top of Éponine's time wandering the forest, must mean that Cosette and Valjean have returned to the palace, with the heart of some poor beast there to stand in for Éponine's. “And the gentlemen next door keep some chickens. They have enough extra hay to bring some here, and we have an extra blanket or two, so you'll have a bed as good as this one, anyway.”

“You said there'd be a storm the other night, and then you said you would visit someone—them, whoever it is?”

“Yes, those ones.” That's Fantine, with a smile on her face, perhaps forgiving Éponine for the conversation they had before Simplice's return, or for the fact of her presence in their home. “I went there early this morning, and they were a little concerned, but they don't think there will be much danger. We're far out of reach of the palace here, as long as we stay quiet.”

Éponine can stay quiet. She'll rest, recover, think of what she can do to get Gavroche and Azelma and get them all as far away from the palace as possible. “I'll be as little trouble as possible,” she promises.

Fantine's smile drops from her face, and Éponine wonders if she always seems so sad or if Éponine's presence is making it worse. From the way Simplice's eyes go soft looking at her, she thinks the sadness may be a habit. “We told you you're welcome—we know you won't make trouble for us.”

That isn't quite the same thing, and both of them know it when she's already wished her recovery on them, and another mouth to feed in the worst part of winter. “Thank you,” she says instead of saying it, and lets Simplice help her off the pallet so she can walk around until her legs start shaking.

*

A day later, when Éponine has been seated at the table and given an old blanket to mend, since she mentioned that she can sew a little, there's a knock on the door. She fumbles her needle, wincing when it pricks her, and is half out of her seat, ready to run, when Simplice opens the door, revealing a young man Éponine doesn't recognize, all arms and legs and with a big bag full of something in his arms.

Simplice and Fantine both smile, waving him in, and Éponine tries to force herself to relax while they chatter about his walk over, and if the sun is filtering through the trees enough to melt some snow.

“I brought the bedding you asked for,” he says, smiling at both of them a little hesitantly. “Mabeuf thought about coming with me, but the snow is still a little deep and the chicken coop needed a few repairs anyway.”

“This is Marius,” says Fantine, looking over her shoulder while Simplice takes the bag, fussing over Marius as he blushes and brushes snow out of his hair and lets himself be pulled inside. “He lives west of here—the neighbor we mentioned. Marius, Éponine is staying with us for a little while.”

He gives an awkward bob that's half a bow, which tells her that when Fantine went to ask for bedding, she also went to warn her neighbors what trouble might be coming down on their heads. Éponine stands, because she can't bear to meet this sitting down. “I'm pleased to meet you.”

After a second of scrutinizing her, he breaks out into a bright smile that makes him a hundred times more handsome. “Pleased to meet you too. Fantine tells me things have been difficult for you?”

Éponine still hasn't told Fantine and Simplice much about what happened. She's said that her mother wants her dead, but she didn't mention Cosette or Valjean, didn't mention just what her mother wanted from her. She doesn't know how to say any of it, and she knows it's foolish, but she wants to keep Cosette's secrets. It's all she can do for her, now and perhaps ever. “I suppose that's a way to say it. You've all been very generous. I have a lot to thank you for—hospitality, and bedding, and everything.”

“They helped me too,” says Marius, to her surprise. “I'm from the kingdom on the other side of the forest, and there were reasons I had to leave, and they took me in. They're good people.”

“That I know,” Éponine says, as warmly as she can manage.

“You can ask Marius to tell you his story sometime,” Simplice says, “and share yours as well, if you wish. He's the youngest of us in this part of the woods, so in the winter especially he's the one to go out foraging. When you've regained more of your strength, perhaps you could join him.”

“I don't know how to forage, but I'm happy to learn. I don't want anyone going hungry because of me.”

Marius beams at her, and the full force of his smile is almost shocking. She's had little enough of that in her life. “Don't worry, I didn't know at first either, but Mabeuf taught me what's poisonous and what can be eaten, and he can teach you the same. We all help each other learn here.”

Éponine has little to teach, but she doesn't want to tell him that when he suddenly seems full of enthusiasm about her presence. “I'll look forward to it.”

Simplice smiles between them and beckons Éponine over to them. “Come here. The mending can wait, we'll teach you how to make your mattress. And Marius, she's a fine hand mending and sewing, it seems, so in payment for the extra bedding, we'd be glad to do some mending for you.”

“We'll be glad to take you up on the offer.” He turns to Éponine. “If you're willing, that is.”

“Fantine and Simplice have been very gracious to take me in. I'm happy to do a little bit of sewing, in exchange for the trouble they've taken for me. It's the least I could do, truly.”

Éponine is busy following Simplice's example to try to put the hay into some kind of order, and when Marius is silent for too long, she looks over her shoulder to find him frowning a little. When he notices her looking, he smiles again, but he still seems worried. “You'll settle in quickly. If you want to.”

“I'll try my hardest to learn.”

Fantine puts her hand on Éponine's shoulder. “For right now, learn how to make your bed. One thing at a time.”

*

The bed is scratchy and full of lumps, but Éponine made it herself, and she wakes in the morning feeling perhaps not rested, but determined.

Cosette has given her a life. The least she can do is make sure she can live it.

*

It's a week before Simplice declares her well enough to go out in the snow, and Fantine walks her through the forest to the home that belongs to Marius and Mabeuf. Marius has been by again, another few times, always eager to see her settle in and hesitant to ask too many questions, but she hasn't yet met Mabeuf.

Fantine is quiet as they walk, but it seems she's always quiet, and Éponine can't say she minds it. Fantine's silence and reserve suits her more than Simplice's sweetness, when she has so much to think about. Recovering means she has hours to spend picking through the threads of her life and wondering if her mother always meant to kill her, and still more hours to wondering what's happening to Gavroche and Azelma, and wondering if Cosette is being punished for her kindness.

Marius and Mabeuf's home is a little larger and sturdier than the one Éponine has been staying in, with a little shed built into one side of it where Éponine can hear the busy sounds of chickens. Fantine knocks sharply on the door and a white-haired man answers. His face is wrinkled both from worry and from smiles, and he bows over Éponine's hand in an unmistakably courtly gesture after he invites her in.

“No one should bow to me,” Éponine says, a little too sharply. “I'm no princess anymore.”

“Well then, I'll welcome another traveler to our little haven.” He looks over his shoulder. “Marius, do you have your boots on? I hear you've been very ill, dear. Are you sure you're up to starting to learn the forest?”

“The sooner I can learn, the better.” Even the short walk to the cottage has taxed her more than it should have, but she can walk a ways yet. “I won't be a burden.”

His eyes crinkle into a smile, but there's sadness too, and she wonders how long he's been in these woods, and what he left behind. She hasn't dared to ask any of them, and might never do it. “I have books, if you'd like to come here and study them. Marius has done so, and it's helped him find us food more than once.”

“I would enjoy that. I want to know as much as I can.”

Marius appears through a door, dressed for the outdoors, and gives her a nod and Fantine a smile. “Are you going to stay here, Fantine, or should I deliver her to your house when we've finished?”

“I'm going to stay a while, but you should take her home at the end anyway. Simplice will be glad to see her, and then there's no risk of us missing each other.”

Éponine wants to complain at being treated like a child likely to stray, but she knows how lost she'd get, left on her own. That's why she's learning. She doesn't know the shape of her future, but she knows like a rock in her boot that she's going to have to cross this forest someday. “Are you ready?” she asks Marius.

He smiles, makes an expansive gesture. “Let's go.”

*

Éponine sees tracks of rabbits and deer, with Marius pointing them out, and trailsign that says hunters or charcoal burners have been not far from them, which seems to worry him. He shows her winter berries, the ones that are poisonous and the ones that are bitter but which can be made into tea. He shows her the evergreen needles that can be eaten, the roots of plants that can be dug up, tells her that in the spring the whole forest will be their kitchen garden.

It's hard to see that far, when spring is still some time away, but Éponine memorizes what she can, learns very quickly how to hide their tracks behind them in case anyone goes looking for them. Marius seems to appreciate her attention, and he's a good and patient teacher and offers his arm when she gets too tired to climb over another fallen tree trunk.

Once, in the distance, she thinks she hears a familiar voice shouting her name, but Marius doesn't seem to notice, and she's tired by then, so she decides she must be imagining it.

*

A month passes in a blink. Éponine heals well, and then grimly sets about gaining all the strength and skill she can. Every third or fourth day, she and Marius meet to scavenge in the woods, and after a few such meetings, she's helping, not just learning. Simplice and Fantine teach her how to set snares and chop wood, and Mabeuf teaches her the plants she'll need to look out for come spring and how to take care of the chickens.

When they reluctantly trust her to be able to find her way back, Éponine starts ranging farther afield than Marius generally prefers to go, mapping the part of the forest they're in, making sure she knows it well. With every inch of snow that melts, she goes a little farther, and it does begin melting, as the month wears on, the winter tiring itself out and fading.

Fantine and Simplice send her out to check the rabbit traps one warm day when Éponine can't even feel the echo of the cold that almost killed her, and she checks the traps, stowing away their dinners for the week in her bag and then continuing her explorations.

She's just beginning to think that Simplice and Fantine might start worrying about her, that she should turn around, when she hears her name being called. She knows she isn't imagining it, but it's an impossible voice, one she shouldn't be hearing out here in the deepest part of the forest.

Éponine runs, almost dropping her bag, forgetting to cover her tracks in the snow, and when she hears her name again, she corrects directions because it sounds so close, and she comes out into a clearing she's never seen before and sees Gavroche. Gavroche, warmly dressed and safe even if he looks tired, and she stops herself instead of running to him and throwing her arms around him. She wants to, after all this time and worry, but it's never been something they did.

“I told you to stay and keep yourself safe,” she says helplessly.

Gavroche beams at her, that urchin grin, and she can't possibly be imagining this. “Well, she decided that if you weren't around, I'd do just fine. Your Cosette got me out.”

“Oh, my Cosette, is it?” He's always known her weaknesses, even if he rarely teases her for them. She hesitates. “Azelma?”

He frowns. “Safe enough, I think. You know she's Mother and Father's favorite.”

“And Cosette?” If he already knows that weakness, it can't hurt to ask.

“Probably going to have to leave the palace at some point, but doesn't seem too worried yet.” He shrugs. “I don't think Mother pays much attention to her. More worried about the father.”

Now that he's here, Éponine is restless and worried, wondering if he's been followed, waiting for something horrible to happen. Still, this is her brother, the dearest person she knows, and she forces herself to relax. “I have somewhere we can stay for a little while.”

He peers at her. “Do you? Who even lives out here?”

“Just some people. I don't ask questions about them and they don't ask questions about me.”

Another shrug. He pats the bag he has slung over his shoulder. “Want something to eat before we go anywhere? Cosette sent me off with supplies.”

Éponine hesitates. Fantine and Simplice will definitely be worrying if she waits long enough to sit and eat with Gavroche, but she also doesn't know if she can just walk out of the woods with him in tow and expect them to welcome him the way they did her. They must worry that the royal children will wear a path from the palace into their peaceful part of the forest, and Éponine can't even tell them it's not true. Gavroche found her somehow, after all.

“Bread, cheese, some dried fruit,” Gavroche is saying, and that, to Éponine's shame, convinces her. There's some dried fruit in the forest, from wild apple trees, but the bread is harder than she's used to, and she hasn't had cheese at all.

“We can stay a little while,” she says, and sits down on a fallen tree trunk, since there's still too much snow on the ground to sit there.

Gavroche seats himself a little ways away, with his bag spread between them, and he offers her a piece of cheese first, probably remembering how much she likes it. “Are you going to tell me what exactly Mother wants with us, and why Cosette knows so much about it?”

Éponine takes a bite of the cheese so she can think over her answer, even though Gavroche gives her an annoyed look. She could say that all she knows is that the queen thinks her children are her immortality and that it might involve her heart, or just her death, and probably Gavroche and Azelma's too, even if Azelma is their parents' pet. She could say that Cosette was asked to kill her, and let her go.

Before she can answer, though, her head starts swimming, vision greying like it did when the cold almost killed her.

Éponine has just enough strength to look at Gavroche and realize that he's never once in his life called their parents Mother and Father.

He's smiling.

*

Éponine wakes gasping and choking, someone pounding firmly on her back, her face mashed into the snow and the muddy pine needles just beginning to show beneath it. Her body is screaming with pain and fear and horror, and she cries out more from that than from the lack of gentleness.

“Éponine,” says Simplice, with every sign of relief, taking her by the shoulder and turning her. “You had me worried. Who gave that to you?”

The pain is trying to pull her attention, but there are more immediate things to deal with, from the disgusting mess on the ground that Simplice must have forced out of her to the memory of what happened just before she lost consciousness. “She has Gavroche,” she gasps, and tries to sit up. Her ribs twinge as soon as she tries, bruised or broken, but she shakes off Simplice's helping hands and makes it upright. “I have to go, I have to get him, I have to protect him—get your hands off me, I have to go, she has all of them and she won't stop now.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“There's no _time_ , let me go.” She tries to stumble her way to her feet and fails.

“You were poisoned and nearly died. You're in no state to be fighting your mother. Why would you take food from her?”

Éponine surrenders when her ribs scream at her again on her next attempt to stand, tips back and tries to swallow her tears. “There was some magic I don't understand. She looked just like Gavroche, she knows I trust him more than anyone else. I was so _stupid_.”

“You were hopeful.” When Éponine looks over her shoulder, Simplice's eyes are full of tears, and after a moment, she moves, helping Éponine to her feet, taking Éponine's arm over her shoulder so she can start walking them back home. “And I'm glad that I started to wonder where you were. It must have happened soon before I came, or I wouldn't have been able to save you.”

“Why didn't she take me? She needs me for what she wants, she needs my heart. Why didn't she take me?” Éponine swallows again, because she can't and won't lose control, not now.

Simplice walks a few steps, and Éponine staggers, but finds that she can follow, even if she can't take all of her own weight. Now that she's upright, she's cold in the way she wasn't earlier, perhaps a fever from the poison chilling her, and she grits her teeth against shivers and waits to see if Simplice has an answer to questions she knows can't and probably shouldn't be answered. “Maybe wanting your heart in the first place was just theater,” she finally says, to Éponine's surprise. “In the end, maybe she just needs you dead, at her hand or her orders.”

“If I don't die, it will be Gavroche and Azelma, I know it. I can't let her kill them.”

Simplice hushes her. “We'll talk about it at home, Éponine. Just keep walking.”

By the time they get back to the cottage, Éponine is raving with fever, barely putting one foot in front of the other, and she stumbles on the threshold when Fantine opens the door, white-faced with worry or fear. She knows she's mumbling but can't remember the words once they're past her lips, until Fantine asks, voice high and sharp, what happened and all she can say is “She knows about Cosette, she knows Cosette helped me, I have to get her out too” before she stumbles and falls.

*

Éponine wakes feeling like someone took a hammer to her temple, but she wakes, which is more than she was expecting. Simplice and Fantine's home seems full of people and whispers, when she blinks her eyes open. Mabeuf and Simplice are at the table, their heads bent over some dried herbs they must be planning to make a poultice out of. Fantine is pacing like a wolf in a cage, mouth a tight line.

Marius, when she shifts enough to change her line of sight, is sitting by her bedside looking shaken and young, and when he sees her eyes open he's instantly on his feet. “She's up.”

Simplice and Mabeuf both move, but Fantine reaches her first, standing over Éponine's bed with her hands clenched into fists. “What happened to my daughter?”

“Fantine, she needs rest,” Mabeuf says, but it doesn't stop Fantine hovering over her like the wrong word will send her for Éponine's throat.

Éponine pushes herself upright, even though it won't make her tall enough to feel completely safe with Fantine looking at her like that. Her ribs protest, but she feels more alert, and stronger, than she did when the cold almost killed her. The poison may have left her feverish, but it hasn't killed her, and her head is clear. She can look at Fantine, see all the things that made her familiar in the first place, the curve of jaw and eyebrow, the shape of her hands, all dismissed because the coloring was different, because it seemed impossible, because Éponine was too caught in her own life to worry about Fantine's or even Cosette's, in more than the abstract. Her mother's visit has changed that.

“Cosette saved my life,” she says, and Fantine's whole body tenses when she says Cosette's name. “My mother threatened her and her father, told them to kill me, and he might have done it. He'll do anything to protect her, even when it will hurt him. But she told me to run, and saved my life. My mother knows I'm alive, and she knows Cosette spared me.”

“Her father.” Fantine's mouth moves a little as she searches for words. “He—he goes by many names, if he's the man I'm thinking of. What name do you know him by?”

“Valjean.”

“The fool.” Fantine takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. The other three are frozen, watching them. Marius looks the most shocked, and Simplice the least, neither of which is surprising. “Is she dead now? For saving you?”

“I don't know.” Fantine scowls, and Éponine musters her thoughts. “Mother would have taunted me with it, even in disguise, if the one who saved me was dead, but she's in danger. If she's not imprisoned, she ...” She swallows. “She will be soon.”

“And Valjean with her, no doubt.” She walks away from Éponine's bed, to the door, where her coat is hanging. “I must go, if she's still—if she's alive, I must—”

“You and Éponine,” says Simplice gently, “can't take on the queen alone and unprepared. I ache for you both, but you can't go like this.”

Éponine stands, and to her surprise, when Marius comes to hover at her side, it's not to implore her to sit again, but to help her upright. “Then we'll prepare, and go when we can. I want them all out. Gavroche, Azelma, Cosette—Valjean, even if he would have seen me dead. I'll get them out even if I have to turn myself over to do it.”

“No one is doing anything rash yet,” says Mabeuf. “First, Éponine will tell us all the parts of what happened yesterday that we haven't yet learned, and then the parts of what happened when she ran away that she didn't see fit to share, and then we'll discuss her recovery, and _then_ we will discuss the rest of it.”

Éponine is chafing, ready to run through the forest half a pace behind Fantine if she starts putting on her boots as she so clearly longs to do, but she makes herself relax and walk to the table. She's only lost a day, and she'll recover faster this time. “If I'd known who Cosette is to you, I never would have kept her name back. I suppose I was trying to protect her.” All four of them are looking at her like her gratitude and everything else she feels for Cosette are written across her face, and it's a small humiliation, but Éponine swallows it down. “But if it will help, I'll tell you everything I know.”

*

Marius meets her two days later, when she insists she's well enough to forage for the early bulbs that might just be sprouting that are good to eat. She might not be, but she won't waste time, and if having Marius as an escort is the price for being let out of the cottage, she'll take it.

For the first few minutes, both of them are quiet. Éponine is scouting for anything she recognizes, and Marius seems to have something in his mind. When he's ready, he'll say it, and she's so tired of talking about herself that she's happy to wait. “I was hurt when I came to the forest,” he finally says, and she grunts to let him know she's listening but doesn't comment. “Broken arm. Some friends were—might still be, I don't know—fighting against our king. I found Mabeuf and he took me in, and called for Simplice, and nearly as soon as she had the bone mending, a summer fever set in.”

“They're always taking in the injured and lost, it seems.”

Marius shrugs. “Does anyone come here if they're neither?” He sounds honestly curious, but he doesn't wait for an answer. Éponine doesn't have one anyway. “I woke up one night and Fantine was tending me. I hadn't met her before I got sick, so for all I knew she was an angel, but when she saw I was awake she started talking about her daughter.”

Éponine wishes she knew Cosette better, beyond what she knows through observation. Observation told her of Cosette's nature, but not about her history. Did she know about her mother, or whatever father she had by blood? Would she have sent Éponine into the forest if she'd known her mother was waiting there? Would she have sent her with a message?

“She hadn't seen the child since she was perhaps three, or had any contact with her after she was five, and her temporary guardians took the palace. She assumed Cosette was moved somewhere, or even dead, because she got very ill not long before, and it was thought she would die. She told a kind man she met to watch over her daughter, and might have died if Simplice hadn't found her.”

“And she never went looking?”

“By then, she was a fugitive. And she had faith in the man to care for her daughter. But she missed her still.”

“If I knew, I would have told them to come with me.”

Marius is silent for a little while, pulling her over to a fallen birch. It's too wet to burn, but they can strip it of bark for tinder, and Éponine does it while he thinks over what she said. “If none of you had some back, the queen and king would have torn the forest apart, burned it down if they had to. She bought you time. And us time.”

“But she could be dead, and it's my fault. Fantine won't forgive me that.”

“It isn't your fault,” says Marius, but it doesn't sound true even as he says it.

*

The snow keeps melting, and Éponine keeps getting stronger. She recovers from the poison and even more, she works to be stronger, to know the forest better, to know tracks and how to hide them. Fantine is still strange with her, sometimes desperate for tales of what she knows of Cosette's life at the palace and sometimes unwilling even to look at her.

Everyone begs her not to go out alone again, but Éponine grits her teeth and does it anyway. She can't let the forest scare her, and her mother can't risk many trips out into the woods looking for her errant daughter. Besides, whatever let her know that Éponine is alive took a while the first time. She might have another reprieve while the queen thinks that the poison worked.

She spends mornings with Mabeuf, reading about herbs and forest lore, and afternoons with Marius or alone, continuing her attempts to map the forest and to glean what useful things she can from it. In the evening, she sits with Fantine and Simplice, doing mending or needlework or, when she asks, telling Fantine what she knows about Cosette.

She's restless, but she doesn't yet have a plan, so she stays in the forest and stews, wonders how to help her siblings, how to save Cosette if she's not yet dead, wonders what kind of sacrifice that will take.

*

Spring comes, and Éponine learns to walk as quietly on growing grass and dead twigs and needles as she did on crunching snow. When it's warmer, she can walk farther, and there's more food, more game, more of everything. Simplice surprises her by packing up a bag and bedroll and leaving for two days, traveling to a forest village for a trading fair, taking some of her and Fantine's winter crafts and Éponine's needlework to restock on supplies.

Éponine goes out walking to a clearing Marius showed her in the winter that he said would have early dandelions, hoping for some greens, and stops before she gets there, because she hears crying.

This time, Éponine isn't going to trust easily, so she makes herself as silent as she can be and creeps close enough to peer into the clearing. Her first thought is that there don't yet seem to be dandelions.

Her second is that Azelma has found her way to the forest. She's even less prepared than Éponine was, dressed in a pretty silk gown and a shawl that branches have ripped to shreds and mud has ruined, and her hair is a bird's nest when she's usually neat with it.

Half of her wants to walk away. This could be her mother again, in another cruel disguise, playing on Éponine's pity, on her love for her siblings.

But if it is her mother, she'll find Éponine eventually. Now, at least, she won't be leading her directly to her doorstep. And if it's Azelma, she'll never forgive herself if she learned that she left her little sister in the forest to starve.

Éponine slips out from behind a tree and finds that she has to deliberately snap a twig before she gains Azelma's attention. Azelma's face lights up with shock and delight, but she clenches her hands in her lap instead of standing to greet her.

Her mother has been working harder on this impersonation. Éponine has been over her meeting with her and knows that her own desperate desire to see Gavroche safe had done most of the work for her. Now, she seems to have Azelma's way of trembling when she's overcome. “You found me,” she's saying, over and over again.

Éponine stays at a wary distance, but she cuts her off. “How did you even know to come to this part of the forest?”

Azelma stops speaking, startled. “I found Valjean's prison cell before I left. He knew people lived in this direction, drew me a map. I can follow the sun, but I did get lost, so it's—Éponine, what's wrong?”

Éponine sighs and sits down on a rock across the clearing from Azelma, who looks stung, and damn their mother for using her sweet little sister for this and doing a good job with the disguise. “Mother, if you want to kill me just do it. I'm prepared for that now. You don't need to pretend like this.”

Azelma's eyes get wide. “What are you talking about?”

“Fine, I'll play the game. Why did you come to the forest?”

“I …” She looks genuinely baffled, Éponine will give her that. “I came to find you. As soon as I knew you hadn't died at all.”

“Oh? How did you find that out?”

“I overheard Mother and Father talking the other night, and then I asked Cosette and Valjean. I never liked that she threw them in prison for coming back without you, letting you be killed by some beast. She said ...” Azelma swallows. “She said you hadn't died, and what Mother had really sent you for.”

She hopes it's true, that they're only in prison and not dead, but she can't trust it. “Where's Gavroche?”

Azelma drops her gaze, and Éponine waits for the story to fall apart. “He's been all but under house arrest, and whenever I asked Father he said Mother just wants a close eye kept on him. I thought about trying to get him out, but I barely made it, and no one thought to keep an eye on me.”

Éponine wonders how much of it is true. Her mother has no reason to lie, if she thinks Éponine won't leave this encounter alive. She won't fail to kill her a third time, after all. No reason not to share her cleverness. Éponine would be glad for the information if she thought she would ever have the chance to use that. “And why is that?”

“Why are you so angry at me?” asks Azelma, plaintive. “I know that I've tried to make my peace with Mother and Father more than you or Gavroche, but I'm not the one who tried to kill you, and look at me, I left as soon as I realized what they were doing.”

Éponine nods at the bag next to her. “Yes, and what did you bring with you?”

“What?” She seems baffled that Éponine would even mention her supplies when they've just reunited after months. Éponine could almost believe her, if Gavroche hadn't come before. “I ate all the food, if that's what you're asking. I couldn't find much of that without raising suspicion, I'm never in the kitchens, and I've been wandering for days now. I brought coin and jewelry to sell, mostly, out of my jewel box.” Azelma hesitates, and then like this might infuriate Éponine further: “And yours. Mother never saw to passing on any of your possessions, but I wanted some memories.”

They've never had passwords or inside jokes that would let her reassure herself that it really is her mother in disguise sitting there across from her. But then again, even if there were passwords, if there were a hundred kinds of security, Éponine would still be loath to trust, would still worry. “Show me these memories, then.”

“Something is wrong, I know it.”

“The last time you came to the forest, you were disguised as Gavroche. I'm not quite stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice.”

Azelma flinches back like Éponine struck her, and she'd barely stopped crying but she starts again all the same. Éponine does her best to harden her heart against it. “I don't know what you're talking about. You think I'm Mother? How is that even possible?”

“You've been studying magic my whole life, even when I thought you'd stopped after taking the palace. Immortality? Disguising yourself as someone I care for is child's play, next to that.”

Azelma's voice trembles. “I'll touch everything in my pack if it proves it to you. I'm me, I swear. I know I don't have proof, but I don't—I didn't think it was possible to do that kind of thing.”

“Show me, then. Like you said. Upend your pack, show me what you brought.”

Azelma is weeping while she does it, but Éponine stays exactly where she is, across the clearing and safe. She watches Azelma pour out a wealth in coins and jewels, necklaces and bracelets she recognizes from her box of jewelry as well as Azelma's. Azelma packed a comb, a neat kit of needles and threads that might be the only truly practical thing besides whatever food she packed that she brought, her favorite hair ribbons and an old set of Éponine's, and other things. She packed like a magpie, and Éponine wants to berate her for it, but it makes her waver for the first time. Surely her mother would try to tempt her with something that would matter to her, not all the useless riches that will be dangerous to sell to say the least.

She watches Azelma touch everything in the pack before she lets herself even begin to hope, and she knows the hope is foolish even as she's feeling it. “You really are Azelma, aren't you?”

“I keep telling you I am,” says Azelma, voice wobbling. “I don't know how to make you believe me.”

Éponine doesn't trust it enough to bring Azelma back to Simplice and Fantine. Her mother can't hurt them, or Mabeuf or Marius, all of whose only crime is taking care of Éponine when she was at her most desperate. “I don't know how either,” she admits, and goes closer to help Azelma pick everything up. Azelma isn't wearing gloves. If she's touching poison, it hasn't done anything to her yet.

Maybe she's immune. Maybe there's some kind of trick. But something is going to happen to Éponine unless she turns around and walks away and pretends she never saw Azelma here, and if there's even a chance that it's really her sister, she's not sure she can do that. She goes, staying out of arm's reach of Azelma, and helps her pick things up, confidence growing with each gold coin, each ring and necklace.

She picks up one of her hair ribbons by chance, since the breeze tossed it closer to Éponine than to Azelma, and the moment it's in her hands, it starts writhing like a snake, and the next thing she knows, it's wrapped around her throat, choking off her air.

Éponine fights it, trying to fill her lungs and pry the satin from her neck, but it's made strong by magic, and she turns to Azelma, expecting to see her smile the way Gavroche was smiling when her mother stole his face.

Instead, Azelma is screaming, running for Éponine to try to add her strength to hers, and Éponine only has enough time to begin to believe that it's really her before once again, she finds herself falling to the forest floor.

*

Éponine wakes gasping, throat sore like she's been screaming, and she hears crying and voices before she manages to open her eyes.

Azelma is on one side of her, weeping again, hovering near her but with her hands in the air like she doesn't dare touch, and Marius is on the other, with a knife in his hand, looking less friendly than she's ever seen Marius look. “Stop,” she tells both of them, and they both snap to look at her as she sits up, rubbing her throat and wincing. Her fingers come away bloody. “What happened?”

Marius jerks his head in Azelma's direction. “She tried to choke you, and when I heard her screaming, I cut the ribbon off of you, and cut it to pieces.”

“I didn't, I didn't, I wouldn't ever, why won't anyone believe that I'm myself?” says Azelma, through tears.

“Why would she be screaming?” Éponine asks, and Azelma gives her a startled look. “If she was trying to kill me, why would she scream in time that you found us and saved me? Why didn't she try to stop you?”

Marius scowls. “You shouldn't trust her. If she came disguised as one sibling, why shouldn't she come disguised as the other? Maybe she just wants to know who your allies are, so she can keep us from saving you the next time.”

“All she would have had to do is not scream and left me here and it wouldn't matter who my allies are.” When she pulls her hand away from her neck, there's blood on it. Marius must have cut her when he cut the ribbon off her. She feels dizzy and sore, but not as weak as she felt after the poison, or after she almost died of the cold. “Where did you get that ribbon, Azelma?”

“It was one of your old ones, I told you. I took it to remember you by, and it was close to hand when I was packing so I decided to bring it. I'm so sorry.”

“I doubt it was close to hand by accident.” Their parents already tried to make Cosette and Valjean into murderers. Of course they would try to use Azelma for their dirty work too. Gavroche wouldn't trust anything enough to be a useful tool, of course their mother had to use a disguise to try to use his relationship with Éponine to bring her down. Azelma has a habit of trusting their parents too much, and wouldn't have noticed a ribbon disappearing and reappearing again when she just happened to overhear a conversation. “Marius, it's her.”

“And if she kills you, Fantine, and Simplice in your beds tonight and disappears back to the palace?”

“Tie me up,” says Azelma, to Éponine's shock, finally swallowing her tears and meeting Marius's eyes. “Tie me up, keep watch over me, I don't care, anything that will make you believe that I wouldn't try to kill my sister.”

Éponine looks at Marius, who seems inclined to soften at that. “Is that enough for you? I'd like to get home, and let Simplice and Fantine know what happened.”

After a long moment, he nods. “Let's get you home, then. I can't say I'm happy about this, or that Simplice or Fantine will be, but we won't cast her out if you trust her.”

Trust isn't really the word for it, but it's the closest she can get for right now, so she nods, and holds out her hands to let them pull her to her feet. Her head swims as she gets her feet under her, but after a moment she pushes them gently away and finds she can stand and even walk without assistance. “Let's go talk to them, then,” she says, and now she can hear the rasp in her voice like she breathed smoke.

Marius frowns and Azelma twists her hands in front of her, but when Éponine starts walking, they follow her, only stopping to pick up Azelma's pack and Marius's day's forage as they go.

*

Simplice opens the door before they reach it, and she's already wide-eyed and pale, watching Azelma like maybe she walked them there at knife-point. Éponine speaks even though as time passes it hurts her more and more. “From what I can tell, it's really Azelma, and I couldn't leave her there in the forest.”

Simplice purses her lips. “We'll find that out, won't we? Marius, you go fetch Mabeuf, tell him to bring whatever books of magic he has. You girls, come inside.”

Azelma glances at Éponine, unsure, and Éponine nods and turns to Marius. “We'll be safe here while you get him.”

“I won't hurt her,” Azelma says, voice wavering, and then blinks when Fantine appears at the door. “I didn't know Cosette had anyone in the forest.”

Fantine flinches, but Simplice doesn't let that hold them up, just gestures them inside and gives Marius another raise of the eyebrows that gets him walking. Fantine grabs Éponine's arm in the doorway as Simplice ushers Azelma in to the fire and, no doubt, some food. “Be sure,” she says quietly.

“I'm not sure of anything.”

Fantine is looking mostly at Éponine's neck, which must be ringed with an impressive bruise from the way it feels, bisected in at least one place with a knife scratch. “If you've just brought the queen to my doorstep and she knows I'm Cosette's mother, she can't leave here alive.”

“If she lives, she's going to keep coming after me, and everyone I love. You know that.”

“I do.” Fantine pulls her inside and shuts the door after her. “I just wondered if you did.”

*

Éponine hadn't known that Mabeuf can do magic, but with his skills with herbs, she can't say he's surprised when he shows up with a cloudy mirror and a bag of aromatic plants. He gives Azelma a kindly smile, and she smiles shakily back, a little steadier with a bowl of stew in her, even if Fantine and Simplice's home has been awkwardly silent while they've been waiting.

Marius stands by the door, scowling, while Mabeuf comes to greet Éponine. “You're lucky Marius's knife is iron. It undoes most spells,” he says after a few moments. “I can give you some herbs for bruising, and a tea to strengthen your breath. You've scared us three times, now. Don't do it a fourth.”

“She'll keep coming.” That's Fantine, stepping forward to take Mabeuf's supplies and start busily setting them up. “Don't make Éponine make any promises.”

“Why does she want to kill you so much?” Azelma asks, voice a little steadier than it has been, and follows when Mabeuf shepherds her over to the table where Fantine is working, though she keeps watching Éponine over her shoulder.

“I think she thinks it will make her immortal. She never trained us to be heirs.” Fantine glances at her, some look she doesn't know how to interpret, before she goes back to helping Mabeuf. “What are you doing?”

“Mirrors are useful in magic to do with seeing. In this case, we should be able to see if there's an illusion. Though the fact that the young lady hasn't objected to us trying says either that she thinks I'm a very poor magician or that she's innocent of our suspicions.”

Marius stops glaring at that, Azelma is still wide-eyed, and Fantine's shoulders drop a little. Seeing that, Mabeuf talks quietly the whole time he sets up the spell, sprinkling powdered herbs on the mirror, explaining the use of each one, and then invites Azelma to look in the mirror, explaining that if she's under any but the very strongest illusions, it should show her true face.

Azelma snatches up the mirror, and Éponine looks over her shoulder. She sees both of their faces, tired and worn and nervous, and she's glad when Simplice takes the mirror from Azelma in time for Éponine to run to her and throw her arms around her, holding on while both of them try not to cry.

The others fall into quiet conversation, letting the two of them stand there in the middle of the room, Azelma's breath hitching like she wants to cry again and Éponine almost scared to breathe because a victory like this, having her sister beside her, is something she never expected.

“You said they never raised _us_ to be heirs,” Azelma finally says, and Éponine sometimes forgets how quick she is, when she's always seemed the most innocent of the three of them. “We can't ever go back, can we?”

“We have to, to save Gavroche.” She pulls away just far enough that she can meet Fantine's eyes. “And Cosette, and Valjean.”

She doesn't know anything beyond that, but she's starting to see the shape of things. She's always known her parents took the country for power, not for duty. The people aren't happy, even if they're not in immediate danger from her mother's magic or her father's neglect. While their parents rule, they can't go back, but their parents shouldn't be ruling.

And Éponine never learned to be an heir.

“We'll save them all,” says Azelma, fierce, and Éponine tries not to think past that, if only because she knows how unlikely they are to live through it.

*

That night, when they're settled both of them on Éponine's pallet, unwilling to be parted, Azelma brings up Cosette. “The hunter's daughter. Cosette. Once I overheard Mother and Father, I went to them, to ask if it was true that you were still alive. He helped me find you here in the forest, but told me to ask her about you.”

Éponine moves until she can meet Azelma's eyes. “What did she say?”

“She asked if I was going to find you, if you were, and when I said yes, she said she'd saved you, but she wouldn't tell me why.”

Her eyes sting with sudden tears, wondering what Cosette must have thought of that question, filled to the brim with guilt that Azelma has known so little true kindness that she'd need to ask the question. “Did she say anything else? How did she seem?”

“Tired and dirty, but unhurt, I think. She said … if I could find you, I should tell you she's sorry for not being able to protect me and Gavroche, and that she'd tell you to run, but knows you won't do it, not while Gavroche needs help.”

What could Éponine have done, to earn that kind of faith? Nothing at all, that she can tell. “Or her. I owe her my life, I wouldn't leave her either.”

Azelma cuddles in closer, but she doesn't say anything, just leaves Éponine with her suddenly-racing thoughts.

In the morning, she thinks about telling Fantine, eager as she must be for any news at all about her daughter, but the message was for Éponine alone, and she wants to be selfish with it.

*

Azelma's presence puts all of them on edge, though they're kind enough never to make her feel like an imposition, when she's so eager to learn everything anyone will teach her. She doesn't complain when Fantine ruthlessly and expertly takes apart all the jewelry she brought so it's worth less but less likely to endanger them when she starts selling it, bit by bit at the markets outside the forest. She sews herself a new dress out of sacking and rips the gown she ran away in into pieces for other projects, keeping only enough to stitch into a handkerchief.

She trails after Éponine and Marius as they find dandelions, fiddleheads, mushrooms, a hundred other herbs and plants that will keep all of them alive. She spends afternoons with Mabeuf and learns how to care for the chickens.

They keep sharing a bed, Azelma wakes in the night crying more often than not, and too often, Éponine joins her with the memories of poison on her tongue and ribbon around her neck and, above all, the cold in her bones. They stay up whispering about ideas to get Gavroche back only to wake up exhausted and no closer to a plan than they were before, but it still feels like some kind of healing.

*

It only takes a few weeks before Simplice corners Éponine on her own while Azelma is learning some practical sewing from Fantine inside and Éponine is out digging a garden patch for the seeds Simplice bought with the proceeds from the first of Azelma's ruined jewelry.

“You'll run yourselves ragged like this,” Simplice says after a while, eyes on the soil and not Éponine. “I'm glad that you have your sister again, but neither of you is sleeping, and you're worrying all the time with nothing to show for it.”

“We need our brother, and I owe Cosette my life. I owe _Fantine_ my life, and Cosette's in payment for both of those debts. We need them both safe, and Azelma and I don't know how to do it, or if there's a way to do it.” And they still can't talk about what comes after that, if there is an after.

Simplice steadily turns over the soil, gently pulling away the roots that could become weeds. “Will it help them if you fret yourself to exhaustion without a plan?”

“No, but fretting is the only way I know to make a plan.”

“The two of you aren't alone in this, no matter what you think your responsibilities are.”

“Does that mean you have a plan?”

Simplice sighs. “No. But none of us will get them any faster the way you and Azelma are going about it. Your bruises are still fading, and she's barely more than a shadow. If you're going to win this, you have to be stronger.”

“What am I supposed to do once we have Gavroche and Cosette and Valjean?” The question bursts its way out of her and she's embarrassed by it. She wants Simplice to tell her that they can all build a cottage not far from hers, live in the woods like the rest of them and have a quiet, simple life.

She doesn't get an answer at all, and that, she thinks, is an answer on its own.

*

Éponine and Azelma have been clinging together for weeks before they finally get into one of their old snappish fights, leaving Éponine with a headache and Azelma in a temper. When Simplice and Fantine announce that they're planning to go to Mabeuf's while he attempts to introduce a rooster to his small flock, if only temporarily, hoping for a clutch of chicks to be shared with Fantine and Simplice, Azelma jumps on the chance to go with them, and Éponine firmly says that she'll stay at home and sweep, since her headache doesn't make her fit for company.

Azelma may be angry, but she still clutches Éponine's hand on her way out the door. “Don't let anyone in while we're gone. I don't want you to get hurt again. Just pretend no one is here.”

“I'll be safe,” Éponine says, which is a foolish promise, but it makes Azelma's mouth twitch into a brief smile. She'd be foolish for less, when Azelma still wakes crying more nights than not.

When the three of them leave, Éponine sighs with relief and feels guilty about it. In the palace, she was on her own more often than not, unless she was checking in on Gavroche or Azelma. The constant company of the forest is strange and sometimes uncomfortable, and having the cottage to herself centers her. She picks up the broom as she promised to do and starts sweeping dirt and dust out the door from where they've been tracking it in as mud and dust on their boots.

An hour passes, and Éponine thinks about getting a start on dinner, or about checking the garden for sprouts even though Simplice tells her they have some time to wait yet. When she goes to the door, though, she sees a lump next to one of the trees that definitely shouldn't be there. The lump, when she takes a step out, resolves itself into a person, dressed for the forest.

A few more steps, and she recognizes Cosette, and the color of the stain spreading out onto the forest floor around her. Éponine almost flies out of the house and stumbles to her knees next to Cosette, amazed to find her breathing. She's bruised and dirty and thin, wrists raw, and the blood seems to be coming from her leg, not anywhere more life-threatening, but Éponine still tears off her apron and uses it to clumsily bandage her leg.

“How did you find me?” she asks, feeling sick, and Cosette blinks her eyes open, focuses on Éponine, and smiles. Éponine immediately changes her question. “What happened? Can you stand?”

“I had to get out.”

“Where's Valjean?”

Cosette closes her eyes again, but it doesn't look like she's lost consciousness. More like she's grieving.

“No. It wasn't even him who let me go, it was ...” Éponine takes a few deep breaths. This could be a trap, she reminds herself, but it doesn't feel true, with Cosette bleeding on the forest floor, with the news that her parents must have finally lost their patience and killed Cosette's father, who would have done as he was ordered to protect his daughter and didn't disobey them, in the end, other than not to chase her when she ran. “You're going to be okay. There's someone here who will be so glad to see you, and we won't let you get hurt again.”

“Who would know me out here?” Cosette asks, stumbling over the words.

“Worry about that later.” She's no healer, but she has a horrible feeling that if she leaves to get Simplice or Mabeuf or even Fantine, Cosette will succumb to whatever let her stumble into their clearing before falling. “You couldn't even make it to the door? It will hurt you if I try to drag you in.”

“I'm going to be fine,” says Cosette, with a pained little smile. “I'm worried about you. She's going to kill you.”

“She's already tried a few times. I know she isn't done trying.”

“She's going to leave an apple on one of your trees, a poisoned one, I had to warn you.”

Éponine tries to smile. “I'd be a real fool to eat an apple off a tree in spring. I've learned a little more forest sense than that since you last saw me. You'd be proud.”

“I am.” Cosette reaches and squeezes Éponine's fingers. Éponine blinks a little, surprised, but she can't blame Cosette for needing a little human comfort, after being in the dungeons for however long she was there. “She keeps being so certain you've died, and gloating about it. How do you keep surviving?”

“Luck and friends.” Now that Cosette seems a little stronger, she levers her until she can sit up, though most of her weight is still resting on Éponine. “I should really get one of our healers. I still don't know how you found me.”

“My father talked about people living in this part of the forest. It took me a while to get here.” She's still holding on to Éponine's hands, grip firming. “I missed you. I'm sorry I had to send you off on your own.”

Cosette has no reason to have missed Éponine, and there's too much warmth in her eyes, in her smile. Éponine is the one who cares for Cosette, not the other way around, and there's something cold in her stomach, when she thinks about it. If this is a trick, it means her mother knows exactly where she is, and that Éponine has to leave, and take Azelma with her, before the others get hurt. It means she's run out of time. “Clearly I survived,” she says, to buy herself a moment.

“I'm so glad.” Cosette puts her hand on Éponine's face, and Éponine wonders what it is the real Cosette did or said to make her mother think this is the way Éponine will trust what's happening. Instead, it's the opposite. Her mother is giving Éponine what she thinks she wants—what she does want, would want, if it could be trusted. It can't, though. Cosette would have no reason for any of this.

“How did you get out of the dungeon, and so far away from the palace without being caught?” Her voice is shaking a little, and she curses herself for it.

Cosette tilts her head a little, frowning. “I'm a hunter, you know this—I know my way through the woods.”

“And how did you get out?”

That makes Cosette draw back a little, frown deepening, but Éponine won't let herself relent. Much as it would be a relief to collapse in Cosette's arms and be glad to have her there and safe, she had her miracle with Azelma. Cosette here, not to mention Cosette caring for her this way, is too much. “Is something wrong?”

“Tell me how you got out.”

There's an expression of her mother's she recognizes because it always hurt, every time Éponine saw it. It's the expression that goes with her telling Éponine not to be silly, not to worry, not to get involved in this or that political issue because of course she and the king will take care of everything. It's the expression that means Éponine isn't a worthy heir, or a worthy daughter. It sits oddly on Cosette's face. “I just—”

“No. Tell me how you got out, or take off the disguise.” Now Éponine is drawing back, pushing Cosette's hand away from her, leaning away.

Cosette follows, face shifting into a lost-little-girl look Éponine hasn't seen in years, all wide eyes and bitten lip. Cosette hasn't looked like that since her father finally started training her to know the forest and its beasts. She hasn't looked like that since her father adopted her. She's often looked weary, but never so unsure, and Éponine has been watching. She knows. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Does it really matter to you that I believe you, Mother? I'm alone. You could just try to kill me and get it over with before anyone else comes back.”

Finally, she gives up the struggle to be anything but what she is. It's still Cosette's face, but Éponine can see her mother behind it now, and it's almost a relief. “Maybe, my little Snow,” she says, and Éponine's heart clenches. After so long, that name still has power over her, much as she hates it. “Maybe I wanted you to die happy.”

Éponine swallows. “And you expect me to believe my happiness matters to you?” It's an honest question.

“I may need your spark, but since that ill-advised first time, I've tried to give you death with someone you love there for you.”

And that, it seems, is the closest she'll get to affection from her mother. “Are you going to kill them too? Azelma, Gavroche?”

“I'm still not sure I want to be ruling with your father,” she says, Cosette's shoulders shrugging, Cosette's voice so pragmatic and cold that it makes the hair on Éponine's arms raise with how wrong it is.

“If I go willingly ...” Éponine has to breathe before she can continue. “If I go willingly, will you decide it's best to rule alone?”

“Maybe. We'll just have to see.” She smiles. “Don't worry. I've refined my technique. It shouldn't hurt at all.”

Azelma will get Gavroche, and Cosette and Valjean if they still live. She'll take them and run, and Fantine and Simplice and Marius and Mabeuf will melt into the forest, so her mother can't find them. It won't be a true victory, but they'll be alive. She has to believe that, because for now, from what she can tell, the only choices she has are to die screaming and pleading or to die by her own choice.

“Fine, then. You win.”

Cosette's face turns a triumphant smile tender and sweet, and Éponine finds that maybe, somehow, her mother was right, and that it's a comfort to die looking at the face of someone she cares about. Her mother leans in, and this time Éponine doesn't back away. She lets her mother press their foreheads together and breathe in, and in, and in, breathing the breath out of Éponine's lungs.

It doesn't hurt. She only feels cold, and Éponine slumps forward. Her last thought is of walking in the snow through the forest, never stopping, leaving no tracks behind her.

*

Éponine wakes up.

She wakes up too hot, ribs aching, her whole body feeling like she was scooped out of it and then dropped back in, but that doesn't matter so much as the fact that she wakes at all.

She has to force her eyes open, and she regrets it. The fire is kindled up high in Simplice and Fantine's fireplace, but it's the only light in the room. Azelma is sprawled on the pallet next to her with tear-tracks on her face, and Mabeuf is dozing nearby, the lines carved in his face deeper than usual in the firelight. She doesn't know what woke her, what brought her to life. A poison has an antidote. A choking ribbon can be cut with iron. What can return the breath to her lungs?

To get an answer, she's going to have to move, but she still has to struggle against her slow limbs. Her thoughts move faster every second, though, and she trusts that her body will follow in time. In very little time, she has to hope, because they don't have much of it. That's the thought that makes her grit her teeth and move until she can put her hand on Azelma's shoulder and shake her gently until her eyes snap open.

Éponine doesn't know what she expects. Tears, exclamations, a shout for someone to wake and tend to Éponine. Instead, Azelma gives her only calm, the same calm she showed in the palace when something was amiss but she didn't want anyone to know it. “I tell you not to let in danger, so you go out to meet it instead,” she whispers, and it's only then that Éponine realizes that she's furious. “She left you laid out like you were in a coffin, with flowers in your hands and all. That wasn't near-death, it was death. You're lucky. And stupid.”

“I'm both,” Éponine agrees, “but if I'd tried to wait, she might have caught you first, she might have caught the others, and Fantine—she was wearing Cosette's face. That would have been cruel.”

“And finding you cold wasn't? How would I get Gavroche without you?”

Éponine turns her head until she can bury her face in her pillow, though it won't protect her from her sister's anger. She just can't look at her while she explains what little she can explain. “If I let her, if I was willing, she said she'd consider leaving Father vulnerable to death. It was the only chance I could find of you and Gavroche surviving this.”

“We'll survive this through you living and us ...” Azelma swallows. “And us killing them.”

Azelma was always their parents' favorite, and now Éponine wonders what Azelma was learning while she let them coddle her, what sharp lessons were hidden behind the smiles. Her parents made a mistake, thinking she was a sweet little girl. Éponine reaches for her hand, and is glad when Azelma squeezes back. She's at least a bit forgiven. “And if we kill them, who rules? You? I don't know how.”

“We can't do worse than them. They're little better than tax collectors, and barely bother repairing half the damage from the spring floods. You know that.”

“I don't. But you do.”

“You're the eldest.”

“I don't care. And if I commit regicide and matricide besides, who would want me on the throne?”

“You can discuss the finer points of that later,” says Mabeuf, startling them both. “Éponine, how do you feel?”

She raises her eyes, and knows he's not asking for the answers that first spring to her tongue. “Tired,” she finally says. “How long was it?”

“More than a day.” Éponine flinches. “It was magic like I've never seen. I think you would have stayed just as you are forever, between one breath and another. She took the death out of you along with the life.”

“How did you heal me?”

“She took your breath, we gave you some back. If it were only one of us, that might have killed whoever tried, but all of us together giving up a little bit of ourselves—well, that will come back soon enough, and it was worth the sacrifice.”

“I owe you all my life four times over now. I don't know what I can do to repay you.”

His smile is gentle, but he must be the one who knew what it would take to save her, and it would take a powerful wizard to know that at all. Mabeuf might be, it seems, a little more than a man who studies herbs. “You can repay me in the morning, my dear. You still need rest.”

“Once she knows I'm alive, she'll come back. I haven't the time to rest.”

“Yes you do,” says Azelma, steely and loud into the quiet now that she knows Mabeuf is awake. “We'll shield you somehow.” She looks at Mabeuf. “Won't we?”

“I have a few ideas, now that I know what kind of magic we're dealing with. But it can all wait for morning. Your mother will still be tired from that working, and she won't have felt it reversing. And I could use a rest for my own sake.”

“We have to get Gavroche and Cosette and Valjean if he's alive,” Éponine insists, but sleep is pulling her under again.

“We will,” says Azelma. “And we'll take the fight to her.”

*

Éponine wakes again to movement in the room. Azelma is still asleep next to her, but everyone else is awake, doing something at the table, and Éponine finds that with a night's rest behind her, she can sit up. Fantine is the first to see the movement, and frowns. “You'll still be weak, while your body cobbles your soul together from the parts we gave you. Don't do too much.”

“I need to do something. Once she knows I'm alive, she might go back to the idea of cutting my heart out.”

“We wouldn't let her,” says Marius. “But we're worried now that maybe you would.”

It stings more in the light of day than it did when Azelma said something similar in the night. Azelma is still sleeping, despite them talking, and Éponine exhales, relieved. She doesn't need to have this conversation twice. “She said if I was willing, she'd leave Azelma and Gavroche alone. I can't trust it completely, but sometimes she keeps her word, when it suits her. Being an immortal queen on her own someday would suit her very much, I think.”

“The only way to be sure they live is to stay alive and protect them,” says Fantine, and she's _angry_ , voice sharp and movements sharper. Angry at Éponine, or maybe herself, and they don't talk about Cosette and Valjean and Éponine's parents and whatever it is that happened so long ago, but maybe someday they should.

“She's using her magic to find you, probably whenever she realizes she's still mortal, so she knows you're alive,” says Mabeuf, interrupting. “There are ways to stop her looking, though. We should have done them weeks ago, and I'm sorry. She'll think you're still dead, and whatever you choose to do, it will be a surprise.”

These people have saved her life, again and again, and she's repaid them with danger and worry and recklessness, but they're still all standing here, waiting to help her. She's careful getting to her feet, letting Azelma sleep a little longer, and she staggers like a child not yet used to walking, but she walks, ignoring the way Simplice darts forward to catch her. “She still has Gavroche, and Cosette.” If Cosette is still alive, but Éponine can't think about that or let Fantine think about it. “You know what I'm going to do.”

“What we're going to do,” says Marius, grim, and none of the others say anything different.

They've done enough for her—done too much for her—but Éponine already knows she needs all the help she can get. “Show me how to stop her seeing, then,” she says, and walks over to the table unaided.

*

The longer they wait, the more likely they are to lose the element of surprise, and the more likely Gavroche and Cosette are to be in trouble. Éponine isn't even letting herself think about Valjean, and can only hope that he'll be alive. Cosette will be devastated otherwise.

If Cosette is alive.

Éponine is no general, but they all look to her for plans. Mostly, she doesn't make plans so much as she asks questions. She asks Azelma about the palace and their parents, about what people know about Éponine's supposed death. She asks Mabeuf about magic and what he thinks her mother can do, and Simplice about what herbs to have in her pack for healing when the fight is done, if they have the luxury of healing.

Fantine takes her walking a few days after they bring her to life, watching her carefully as she moves through the forest. Éponine feels like she's having to relearn her body, like her patchwork soul isn't quite the same as before, but she's mostly mastered it now, and Fantine seems to relax as the walk continues.

“My mother was wearing her face,” Éponine says abruptly a few minutes after they turn around to head for home. “When she came that last time, she was pretending to be Cosette.”

“And what do you think that means?” Fantine asks, her voice unsteady.

“That she knows I trust Cosette. That she let me go.” Éponine regrets saying it a little, now that it's said, but Fantine deserves the information, even if it hurts. She deserves to be prepared. “I don't know if it means she's alive or dead. But I thought you would want to know.”

“She must be alive. She would have taunted you with her death if she were, once you'd recognized her, surely.”

“She told me Valjean was dead. I'm not sure I believe he is, but if she lies about it one way … I hope she's alive. She saved my life and I owe her more than I can say. The least I can do is rescue her.” They walk for a while in silence, until Éponine can almost hear the sounds of Azelma and Marius arguing about something in the distance. “I don't know how you can be so kind to me when you know that saving me could have killed your daughter.”

“You haven't had much of kindness in your life, you or Azelma, even if you had plenty of riches in the palace. But either way—my daughter saved your life, and even if she's dead, I'll protect you because she thought you were worth protecting.”

“I wish you'd raised Azelma and Gavroche and me, instead of my parents raising Cosette until Valjean asked for her. We'd all be happier.”

Fantine's smile is sad, but her voice is wry. “You're all young yet, even if you don't feel like it. There's raising yet to be done, even if you're ruling a country while you're being raised.”

“Azelma will be ruling,” says Éponine, but Fantine shakes her head. Éponine doesn't want to have the argument. She knows it will cause unrest if the second child takes the throne after conspiring to kill her parents, but the unrest will only be worse if the child who did the killing, the one who everyone thought was dead, takes the throne. “She has to,” she says anyway.

“You haven't been to the markets—couldn't, in case someone recognized you. But they talk about you. The martyr princess, who did what her parents wouldn't and walked into the forest with only huntsmen for company to kill a beast, and who died. Your parents barely mourned you, so they've done it for them. Nobody is talking about Azelma going missing—I don't think your parents have told anyone—but they talk about you.”

“I haven't killed any beasts. All I've done is survive, and I haven't done that without help.”

“If you choose to tell everyone what really happened, there will be a revolt if you _aren't_ on the throne. Do you want it?”

They've drifted to a stop now, a few layers of trees away from the clearing where they'll no doubt figure out whatever it is that Azelma and Marius are disagreeing on. “I don't know. Azelma makes more sense. She's had at least a little bit of training. And I don't know if I want anyone from our family on that throne, anyway. We took it by force, even if I'm too young to remember if the last king was worse or better.”

“The last king was worse to his people, but I hope, if he'd lived, he would have been kinder to his child.”

There's something in that, a few answers that only raise more questions, but it isn't the moment to bring them up, even if she thought Fantine would answer them. “We have to win first,” she says, and Fantine relaxes. “We have to win, and then we can argue about who the next queen is.”

“We'll win,” says Fantine, putting a hand on Éponine's shoulder. “We have to.”

*

Their plan is barely a plan. It's really nothing more or less than a risk of tasks: find Cosette and Valjean, if they live, and free them. Find Gavroche and free him. Kill the king and queen, if they can. Any plan firmer than that falls apart as soon as they try to make it, leading to a thousand avenues of all of them being imprisoned or killed, so they don't plan beyond the barest facts and needs.

They don't pick a day because one matters more than another. They just don't want to wait too long, and one day, when the whole group of them are together, their too-ambitious list of things to do laid out once more the same as it was the day before, Éponine says “If we're going to do it, I don't think we're going to be any more prepared than we are now.”

“We'll make our final preparations, then,” says Mabeuf, accepting that easily, as everyone else watches. “Leave tomorrow? Or do we need more time?”

“Tomorrow will do,” says Fantine, and just like that it's decided.

Éponine is restless that night. Now that they're going, she doesn't want to wait, doesn't want to get a last bit of sleep. She wants to leave, and see whatever is going to come of this. Simplice, Fantine, and Azelma all toss and turn as well, until Azelma finally sighs and gets out of bed without making a pretense at quiet when there must still be an hour before dawn.

“If anyone wants tea, it will be ready in five minutes,” she says, and all of them stop pretending to sleep.

Marius and Mabeuf are on their doorstep at dawn, both grave and determined, and they're all packed and ready to leave, the house shuttered up against weather and intruders, since none of them know when they'll be back, or if.

It's more than a day's travel through the forest, even with the others leading the way and not Éponine and Azelma, who stumbled their way in circles before they arrived. After a long walk, they all sleep much better than the night before, and Éponine wakes to find Simplice stirring something over the fire.

“Clean up, make yourself look as neat as you can,” she says as soon as she realizes Éponine is watching her. “Part of this depends on people realizing that you aren't dead after all, and you want to look like a princess.” Éponine opens her mouth, and Simplice shakes her head. “And I'll be telling Azelma the same thing, so don't start talking about what comes after yet.”

Éponine can't find much to say to that, so she does as she's told, following Simplice's directions to a brook where she can scrub her face and hands until they're pink and cold. Azelma joins her before she's done, doing the same thing.

Neither of them look much like they did months ago, when they both still lived in the palace. There's something in Azelma's expressions that's changed, and in the way she carries herself, and Éponine knows she's hollowed out some, with how much she's been sick and hurt. They're still themselves, though, and some people should recognize them. The question is just if those people think Éponine is a hero like Fantine claimed.

“Please stay safe,” says Éponine.

“Gavroche won't run. You won't run.” Azelma's chin tilts, settling into something mulish. “I won't do less. I have to be there to see it done.”

Éponine wonders sometimes just what their parents thought they were raising them to be, besides sacrifices. They failed in that, but she isn't sure what they are instead, Éponine and Azelma so set on the death of their parents and Gavroche no doubt unwilling to let that happen without witnessing it himself. “You know,” she says, “we talk about seeing it done, but we don't talk about who will actually do it.”

Azelma meets her eyes. “Do we need to?”

*

The first shocked murmur of “The princesses” comes from a farmer in the fields next to the forest, and he doesn't dare speak to them while they pass, just watches, mouth agape, as they avoid his neat furrowed rows, striking out for safer ground.

Somehow, word spreads, though Éponine never sees anyone running ahead. Still, in the time they're walking through farmland, more and more people line up to watch them pass, and some of them call her name or Azelma's, tentative. She always makes a point to look, and to wave, but she won't wait. If news is running ahead of them, it might run all the way to the palace.

A woman offers them each a ladle of cold spring water with her eyes wide, all in solemn silence, even when Azelma tries to be friendly and they all thank her, and after that the news seems to travel even faster. No one is lining the roads as they get closer to the palace, but there are eyes on them, and Éponine knows before they reach the palace gates that they won't get through without everyone knowing.

She finds, when she stops in front of a guard who looks at her like he's seen a ghost, that she doesn't care. “We're coming through,” she says.

After a long, tense moment, the guard dips into a bow, and his fellow does too. “Your Highnesses. Welcome home.”

He doesn't ask if she'd like to be escorted to her parents, who must be doing business at this time of day. Éponine dredges up a smile from somewhere, even if she's already thinking of the dungeons, and what awaits them there. “Thank you. We hope to be staying.”

“I think we all hope with you, your Highness,” the other guard dares.

She looks between them, and thinks, even if she can't be sure, that if there's a commotion, if the alarm bell rings, these guards won't be reporting to prevent a coup. She has no idea what to say to that kind of loyalty, or foolishness, but Azelma steps forward like she was born to do it, smiling and clasping their hands in turn. “You're kind,” Azelma says, an easier word than “loyal” when they're ignoring their oaths. “We won't forget it.”

They part, and Éponine walks through the gates first, the rest of them following. After a few steps, Azelma catches up to her and takes her hand, the two of them leading the way to the dungeons.

*

Éponine wasn't sheltered and kept from the dungeons. Once, when she was young, Gavroche barely toddling around the palace, her father took her down, making a mockery of introducing her to the criminals, while Éponine cringed and tried not to cry. From the way Azelma's hand grips tight around her wrist, she might not be the only one with such a memory.

The guards at the door see her and go pale, like she's some kind of ghost, but they nod respectfully and step aside, both of them murmuring a “Your Highness.” The older one, who sometimes escorted Éponine on her rare rides past the palace lands, offers her the keys.

“Is Gavroche here?” she asks, because she might as well prepare herself for that much.

“The prince is in his rooms,” says the older guard, and bows. “If it please you, your Highness, there are some who shouldn't be let free.”

Éponine swallows. It never occurred to her to free all the prisoners, and she thinks perhaps it should have. But she knows that among the innocents locked up for paying their taxes too slowly or speaking ill of the king and queen are those who have done terrible things, and would again if they were freed. “We're only here for two today, if they live. The rest of the cases will …”

“They'll come under review later,” he offers, a show of faith. What have her parents done, that even the guards who should be most loyal to them are willing to betray them just at the sight of a ghost?

“Jean Valjean and his daughter,” she says. If they're willing to trust them with the keys, surely they'll trust them with information, whether it's good or bad in the end.

“They live,” he says, though he looks troubled. “I hadn't felt right, about them being down here, and now that I know you lived … they'll be glad to see friendly faces.”

“Where are they?”

“I'll take you,” says the younger guard, trusting his fellow officer to be making the right choice.

Éponine glances back to find Fantine wide-eyed and pale, visibly trembling. Simplice is holding her hand, and Marius is supporting her other arm. Mabeuf meets Éponine's eyes and gives her a nod. Even though Fantine, by rights, should be leading the way to her own daughter, Éponine follows the guard down the dungeon row, past men and women who look at her in silence, some desperate and some curious and some sneering.

They come to Valjean first, and Éponine unlocks his cell. He's sitting, barely strong enough to lift his head when the door opens, but his eyes widen and he struggles to his feet when he sees who's waiting at the edge of his cell. “Your Highness, I'm sorry,” he says before anything else.

“You would have protected your daughter, and I won't fault you for it,” she interrupts. They don't have the time for apologies and recriminations, and she doesn't want them, either.

Perhaps he recognizes it, because he looks beyond her, and it only takes a moment for his eyes to catch on Fantine. Like the guards when they see Éponine, like the people in the fields, he looks like he's seen a ghost. He whispers her name, and then there's a flurry of movement, Simplice coming forward to check on his health while Fantine rushes to take his hands.

Éponine doesn't want to leave Fantine behind, but she's twitching with the need to check the next cell and see Cosette, the real one and not the cruel mimicry her mother engaged in. They need to get out of the dungeon before their luck runs out, and so she ducks out, saying she's going, and Fantine looks over her shoulder, torn, but she doesn't move. Cosette doesn't know who she is, and perhaps it isn't the day for introducing them, but Éponine still gives her a nod before she goes.

Cosette is already on her feet, after hearing the commotion next door, and her hands are wrapped around the bars of her cell. “Prove you're not the queen,” she says quietly, and Éponine's stomach drops to her feet. Of course her mother would play tricks on others, too, just for the pleasure of it, or to try to get answers out of Cosette. Of course she would use Éponine's face to do it, to make Cosette hate her if she could.

Éponine unlocks the cell, but Cosette is holding the bars too tight for the door to swing open. “I can't,” she says, because Azelma is waiting behind her, and Azelma had no way of proving who she was in the end either. “But I'm the one letting you out.”

“You let me think you were letting me out once before, remember,” says Cosette, and her voice is still so soft and gentle, even though she's dirty, her cheeks hollowed out and her hair matted.

“She can't be more than one person at once, can she? At least she never was with me,” says Éponine, and gestures Azelma forward, and Marius when she sees him hovering too. “Can she be three people?”

“I don't know.” Cosette keeps staring at Éponine, after flickering a look at the other two, and her eyes are misting over.

“And there are three more in the next cell, plus your father, once they're finished fussing over him. Please, at least come out of those bars. We don't have the time for you not to trust me.”

There's a scramble from the next cell, and then the hall is packed with people and Cosette finally looks overwhelmed instead of resigned, eyes tracking from one to another of them until she sees her father and closes her eyes, taking a breath. “Tell me it's real, Papa,” she says. Of course Éponine's mother couldn't have pretended to be him, if he was in the next cell to yell to her that he was right there.

“It's real. There are …” He looks at Fantine, who's holding on to his sleeve with a white-knuckled grip, and Fantine shakes her head. “There are things she couldn't fake. This particular group of people, I think, is one of those things.”

The words settle on Cosette slowly, too slowly for Éponine's itching palms. She wants to be ready, wants to be gone, moving on to get Gavroche and meet her parents before they find her. But she wants Cosette to be ready too, because she started this by saving Éponine's life and she deserves to be there to finish it, if she wants to. When she finally opens her eyes again, she doesn't look at her father, doesn't look at Fantine to wonder who she is. She looks at Éponine instead. “You didn't have to come back.”

“Of course I did.”

Her mouth tugs into a smile, and it's not the bright one Éponine has grown used to catching from the corners of her eyes, directed at her father and other people and never Éponine. It's honest, though, and it's for Éponine, so she can wait for the brighter smiles to return. “Of course you would,” she says, like it's a correction, and steps out of her cell. “Gavroche?”

“We're on our way to him,” says Azelma, looking between them. “You and your father are welcome to do what you will from here. You don't have to fight, if you're feeling weak. We don't have weapons for you, or—anything.”

“I can't fight,” Valjean admits, and it must cost him. He's strong, known for it and often called on to help with lifting when it's needed, but he's shaking with exhaustion and thin with hunger and he's been ill-treated, from what Éponine can tell. He's in no shape for battle.

Simplice pats his arm. “Nor can Mabeuf or I. We're going to be ready, with our herbs and what magic we have, in case they need healing after it's done. You'll wait with us, and we'll practice on you.”

Cosette throws her arms around his neck and holds on for a few moments. “Be safe, Papa, and I'll come back to you as soon as I can.”

Éponine thinks he's about to argue, sees him take the breath to do it, but it's only a few seconds before he breathes it out. He's always protected her, but perhaps her protecting Éponine when he might have killed her proved to him that she can handle herself. “You'll come back,” he agrees, and turns to Éponine. “I owe you—”

“I don't think anyone owes my family anything. But I'll get her safe to you if it's the last thing I do.”

He looks at her like perhaps he understands that Éponine knows what she's saying when she promises that. “Thank you.”

“Come on, Gavroche needs you,” says Fantine, disengaging from Valjean's arm to pull on Éponine's. “Someone in this palace will be loyal enough, or frightened enough, to warn them.”

The guards have fallen back, but both of them look worried, uncomfortable. If Éponine doesn't do this, they're as good as dead, traitors to the crown. “I'll do my best,” she says, and knows it's cold comfort.

The younger one steps forward and addresses himself to Cosette, his duty spear held out. “You'll have used these, while hunting, and you don't have another weapon, miss. Please, do what you can to protect the princess, and we'll—we'll hold the palace if we can.”

Cosette takes the spear and looks a little more settled with it in her hand. “Thank you. I'll return it to you if I can.”

There's nothing more to say, so Éponine walks a few steps, gauging the response. It seems she's still the general of their little force, even if she doesn't know what she'll do with her dagger when she sees her mother. They all follow her out of the dungeons without lingering further.

Valjean, Simplice, and Mabeuf all go, Valjean leading them, to Valjean's old cottage, shut up since her parents won't have bothered to hire a new huntsman in his place. They'll lay out their herbs, prepare for injured, wait until the battle is won or lost and deal with what remains.

The rest of them follow Éponine up the stairs to more familiar parts of the palace and Gavroche's rooms.

*

The corridors seem emptier than they should, and Éponine is uneasy, fists clenched by the time they reach the right door. There aren't guards posted outside it, aren't locks or chains on the door.

“She's trapping you,” Marius warns when Éponine's hand is already on the latch. “You know she must be.”

“We had to meet her. This is easier.” She looks at Azelma. “Get Gavroche safe if you can. He'll trust you more than the others, and I'll be busy.”

Azelma opens her mouth, probably to say that she doesn't need a job that will keep her out of a fight, but she knows Gavroche as well as Éponine does and knows that he won't be held back or kept safe, that he won't trust strangers. Keeping him unhurt doesn't mean Azelma will be away from whatever comes next.

Éponine pushes open the door to Gavroche's bedroom, and for the first time since she was told to go kill a beast that never existed, she sees her mother's face. She's sitting on Gavroche's bed, and he's laying there like he's asleep. Éponine breathes. He won't be dead, not yet. Her mother will want to taunt her, give her another chance to sacrifice herself. “Hello, Mother,” she says.

“My daughter.” She looks over Éponine's shoulder. “Both of my daughters. And a few unexpected guests. My goodness, Fantine, it has been a while since you begged us to take care of your child and disappeared.”

“I was always coming back, but you knew—and you took—” Fantine cuts herself off, and there are more questions one of them will have to ask someday when everything is less raw.

Éponine doesn't look back at Cosette, to see what she understands and what she doesn't, and she doesn't fool herself for a second that her mother is concentrating on anyone but her, even if she's talking to Fantine. She doesn't let herself look at Gavroche, even if all of her is aching to go to him. Even in sleep, he's never this still. He tosses and snores and twitches. “You should never have sent me away,” she says, and doesn't know it's true until the words are out. “You should have just waited until you could steal my breath instead of my heart and killed me in the palace. I wouldn't have fought so hard.”

“Well, you won't fight now, will you? Not with his life in the balance, you've proved that.” Her mother stands up, and across the room, from a chair by the fireplace, her father stands too. Éponine hadn't even noticed he was there, because he's never mattered in this. From the beginning, it's been her and her mother, and anyone else involved was only involved because her mother's plans are too complicated to succeed. “You'll surrender yourself again, and your little band of rebels.”

“You made us rebels,” says Marius, and sometimes he's dreamy, prone to smile at birds and point out flowers instead of doing what he's meant to, but now he's sharp, ready with his hand on a sword she's never seen him practice with but knows he knows how to use. “We'd have been content to live quietly in the woods, but you did this.”

“I'd surrender myself,” Éponine tells her mother, “but I won't surrender them, and I don't think they'll surrender me.”

“So you'll fight,” says her father. “And to what end? To your deaths? Two untrained girls and some peasants? Cosette is the most dangerous of you, and she's been in prison for months. She's too weak to be any good. You'd still try. Even you, Azelma?”

Azelma lifts her chin. “I don't think there's anything more to say.”

Marius, it seems, agrees, because he's already moving before she's finished the sentence, lunging for her mother with his iron knife out, used only for cutting herbs and saving Éponine's life, but now meant to kill. Her mother raises a hand in a warding gesture and throws him to the side, but his attack gets them all moving.

Fantine has her own dagger out as she goes for Éponine's father, and Azelma goes in that direction too. Éponine follows Marius, who's still trying to get close to her mother, and knows that Cosette is at her back, already reaching for the spear the guard provided.

It's quieter than she'd thought battle might be. The loudest sound is blood rushing in her ears, though she knows there are grunts, crashes of metal, boots on stone and furniture skidding when roughly hit. Her father has the sword she's never seen him use out, but Fantine and Azelma won't let him touch them, circling him in swirls of skirts that seem to trip him or confuse him.

Éponine's mother is no wizard from the old tales, wielding fire and lightning; her magic is insidious, more effective than a sword. It's hard for them to get near her, and Éponine concentrates more on getting past her to Gavroche, still on the bed, as dead as Éponine had been, or nearly. She can't do anything, still doesn't know exactly what it is that brought her back to life, but she wants to be with her brother.

But no matter what she tries, her mother is always between them. Maybe it's spite. Maybe it's because she knows he can be saved, and she's determined to have her immortality. Maybe she's immortal now, and the whole fight won't do any good. Éponine doesn't care. She fights because there's nothing else to do, because she's been dead too many times and promised herself she wouldn't just give up.

Marius and Cosette are flanking her, both more experienced than she is, and with Azelma and Fantine doing their best and their worst across the room. For the first time, she's not alone, but for the first time, her mother is showing her full strength, not just trying to trick Éponine into something. Her magic shocks and slices and burns, and Éponine grits her teeth whenever a shot hurts her. Cosette looks frail enough to fall over every time she takes a blow, but every time, she braces and comes back in with her spear like the queen is a boar she's intent on hunting.

Marius is the first to get a cut in, shocking all of them when he makes it past her mother's guard and opens a cut in her raised arm. A second later, she's throwing him back with a snarl and a jolt of something that makes him cry out, but Éponine concentrates on the blood dotting her brocaded sleeve. If she can bleed, she can still die, somehow.

Éponine forgets about trying to cleverly get past her mother without taking some kind of injury and just runs, as fast as she can, not caring about the bolt of magic that hits her on the way and fills her body up with pain like she's a vessel it can be poured into. Somewhere, her father yells, a cut-off shout, and Cosette says something quiet that draws her mother's attention, and Éponine falls onto Gavroche's bed more than anything else, but she's there.

He's warm, even though he's not breathing, and he looks like a perfect picture of a boy his age and Éponine never wants to see it again. She thinks of her own death at her mother's hands, and of the way she has a little bit of soul from all her friends now, warming her and keeping her safe and giving her an obligation to keep them safe and alive. There's blood on her hand when she lifts it to Gavroche's face, she doesn't know from where, but she uses it to steady herself and leans her forehead against his, and breathes out.

With her mother, it felt like her breath was leaving her body of its own accord, but now she has to force it on Gavroche, giving him air from her own lungs, a piece of soul to anchor him to her without giving her whole self up.

As soon as she feels his eyelids flutter, she pulls away, and hates herself when it leaves him stirring only fitfully on the bed. Still, she might have just undone her mother's spell, and she shouts “Now, do it now if you can” at Marius and Cosette without looking at the room and not two seconds later hears a scream that seems to echo and hang in the air forever and the soft thud of something hitting the floor.

Éponine turns around.

The first thing she notices is Cosette, holding one end of the spear, the other through her mother's chest. She's breathing hard, and when she sees Éponine looking, she drops the spear, and the body falls with it. Marius, next to her, seems unsure whether to check her mother's pulse or try to comfort Cosette when he's a stranger to her. Across the room, Azelma is standing over their father's body with blood on her gown and more dripping from her knife, and she's weeping into Fantine's shoulder.

Behind her, Gavroche stirs.

*

Everyone who had disappeared before, getting out of the way so they wouldn't be traitors to whoever was on the throne at day's end, is out and lining the hallways when they leave, walking slow and solemn simply because they're too tired to do otherwise. Gavroche is leaning on Marius and Azelma, and the rest of them trail behind, letting Éponine lead.

Simplice, Mabeuf, and Valjean find them when they're halfway to the throne room, and in a moment, Valjean has caught Cosette up in his arms, and Simplice and Mabeuf have taken them all in hand, worrying over them and trying to pull them somewhere private to tend to them.

“This can't wait,” says Éponine, as apologetic as she can make herself be, pulling herself away from Simplice's inspection of her injuries. “The people need to be reassured, need to know who's in charge. And there must be some loyalists already preparing to execute us for traitors.”

“Most of the guards are on our side,” says Azelma. Her voice is blank, too blank, and Éponine knows there will be consequences after this day's work, but they can't deal with them yet. “But we still can't risk it until we've been to the throne room and everyone has seen us. How do you send out word that you've staged a coup and killed your own parents?”

No one has an answer to that, and no one can tell her she's wrong either, so to the throne room they continue. Éponine concentrates on putting one foot in front of another. The others are a mess of nervous conversation around her, all of them reassuring each other over and over again that they're fine, but Éponine can't make herself speak. Everyone needs comfort, needs to be brought back together to some purpose, but she can't do it. Fantine needs to be introduced to Cosette, but that's beyond her too, and beyond Fantine and Valjean as well, judging from how careful they're being while they both try to coax Cosette to tell them if she's hurt and how much.

Gavroche falls into step next to her. He's walking steadier every minute, and the sight of his increasing liveliness soothes her more than she would have thought. “You didn't stay safe,” she says, since she can't help it.

“I stayed smart, though. I kept my eye on things as best I could, until she locked me up waiting for you to come home.” He brushes off what must have been weeks of uneasy confinement and terror as easily as that, but there's going to have to be a reckoning for him, too, just as much as for the rest of them. “I visited your Cosette a time or two. Not sure if she really believed it was me.”

Her mother said “your Cosette” as well, in Gavroche's voice. The unthinking echo makes her fists clench, but this is the true Gavroche. She left her mother with the light gone from her eyes on his bedroom floor. “Why would you risk yourself like that?”

He hums a little, thinking. “Well, first time, I wanted to ask if she'd killed you, or if her father had. That time she knew it was me. Her Majesty got a little less subtle with the magic the more frustrated she got. She said you were alive the last time she saw you, that she told you to run.”

“She did,” Éponine confirms. She doesn't know if she'll tell him or Cosette that she almost died from lack of knowledge, because what they need to know is that Cosette wouldn't kill her, even if it was for her father's sake and not Éponine's. “At risk to herself.”

They've fallen back, and Cosette looks over her shoulder at them, frowning. Éponine shakes her head, but it still takes her a few moments to look away. “The last time,” Gavroche says, “she didn't think I was me. She asked why I'd come in that disguise now, when she already knew you were dead, and that she'd been sure that time. Seems that every time she thought she killed you, her Majesty decided to gloat.”

To Cosette, not to Gavroche himself, perhaps knowing he would have run away. To remind her of her failure, or for another reason? Éponine is too tired, too heartsore, to find the answer to that question right now. “I'll keep it in mind,” she says. It could be his way of telling her to go gentle on Cosette, or just his way of saying she thought of Éponine while she was gone. Either way, she won't be able to stop thinking about it.

“Do,” he says, and darts forward to grab Azelma's arm to try to make her smile as they approach the throne room doors.

The crowds are thicker the nearer they get, and people watch them as they go by, wide-eyed and curious and murmuring her name and Azelma's. Some reach out for Cosette and Valjean. One woman looks at Fantine and goes as pale as milk, but Éponine can't ask about that yet. First she needs to give answers. She'll have to wait to receive them.

The throne room is packed with people Éponine recognizes from the kitchens, from the stables, government ministers and guards alike, spilling over into a throng with the doors propped open. Some don't look happy, but others are crying with relief, and there are tentative cheers when Éponine and the rest walk through those open doors. There's a path down the middle of the room, straight to the thrones.

Éponine pauses at the door, because she's not meant to be the queen. She's known that since the beginning. Azelma has the sweet temperament and iron will that will make her people love her and her government bend to her will. Cosette, she begins to suspect, has her own claim to the throne from before Éponine's parents conquered the kingdom. Even Gavroche, scapegrace that he is, would win the people to his side.

But Éponine's friends and companions have followed her through this whole palace. None of them is trying to hold her back. And it can be undone later, if Éponine can't be queen. She can step off the throne once it's stable, and find something else to do, somewhere else to go. She can return to the forest, where things are simple.

For now, she walks down the center of the room, her brother and sister flanking her, her friends following after, and she walks up the steps to the throne and turns around to stand there and answer what questions she can.

To her surprise, before she can open her mouth, the room breaks into cheers, all together, like she's just had a crown placed on her head.

Éponine pulls Azelma and Gavroche to stand next to her, and Azelma smiles, putting an arm around her like she knows Éponine needs someone to hold her up. “They're cheering for you,” she says, almost under her breath, and Éponine looks out across the crowd and can almost believe it.

*

A day later, Cosette finds her in the courtyard, where the pyres have been built for her parents with all haste, to be lit at sunset. A traitor's burial, their ashes scattered to the wind instead of their bones left in the ground to anchor their memories, but Éponine heard the suggestion, saw Gavroche's nod, and allowed it. She's been allowing many things, in the past day, and it settles oddly on her shoulders, that everyone is looking to her for leadership when she doesn't know how to do any of it.

She hasn't been alone since she walked into the throne room, but here, with her parents' bodies, people have left her alone. Cosette's approach is a surprise, since she spent most of the morning cloistered with Valjean and Fantine, hearing the story of her own life, but she's one of the only people whose presence Éponine doesn't resent, so she nods and waits for her to say something.

“You brought my mother to me,” she finally says.

“You saved my life. I owed you.” When she looks at Cosette sidelong, Cosette is looking across the courtyard at nothing in particular, away from the pyres. “She never told me, but I think you're the last king's daughter. Did she tell you that?”

“She told me my father wasn't worthy of being called such, so I don't want any claim on him, or any claim on his blood. If that's what you're asking.”

“I don't care about his blood, but I care about what you'd be good at.”

“A hunter's daughter? No, Éponine. I saved you to be queen someday. Or I hoped, anyway.”

“And what have I ever done to make you believe that I'm worthy? You saved my life as you'd do for anyone, but when we were children, I wasn't kind, and then we didn't speak.”

“You were terrible as a child, perhaps, but we're not children now, and it's been many years since you treated me badly. We may not have spoken, but I know where a few kindnesses came from. I'm no fool.”

Somehow, while talking, they've come to face each other, and Éponine is left with Cosette watching her, in dead earnest, somehow believing that Éponine ought to be queen. Éponine has been watching her for years, her envy at the freedom she got going into the forest, the obvious love she had from her father, turning into longing, and longing for her life turning to longing for the woman. She doesn't know what to do with Cosette looking back.

“My mother came to you wearing my face, the time she really killed me,” she says, without quite knowing why she says it until Cosette takes a sharp breath. “What did she want from you, while she was wearing mine?” Gavroche told her some of what her mother told Cosette wearing her own face, but she remembers looking into Cosette's face and making a cruel bargain, has to know if Cosette has any such memories that would make her flinch.

“To taunt me. Once, she came escorted by a guard, pretending she was being thrown in the dungeon beside me. That was the first time. Another, she came in a beautiful dress and said she'd taken the palace and I was to be freed. That time, she asked what had made me save her.”

“What did you say?” Cosette shakes her head, and Éponine allows that. Cosette deserves her secrets. Éponine can offer her a confidence, though, in exchange for the one she was just given. “She took my breath from me, wearing your face. I didn't believe it was you, but I still succumbed. Part of it was the argument she offered, once she stopped the pretense, but part of it was your face, and her impersonation of Gavroche didn't make me give in, nor the true Azelma.”

“What told you that it wasn't me? You might have trusted it, after Azelma.”

Éponine owes Cosette her life, even if Cosette thinks freeing her and bringing her mother to her erases that debt. The least she still owes is an honest answer. “She was acting as though she might be in love with me. You don't—you wouldn't have done that.”

“Oh.” A short syllable, and Cosette looks away, eyes on the ground. She's no coward, but it seems she doesn't want to see Éponine, knowing that. “That must be why she came to me, then. To see how she ought to act around you. A better impersonation.”

“And she came away thinking she ought to pretend you care for me?” The question starts off incredulous, mocking her mother, but when Cosette's eyes stay lowered, her jaw tight, it ends with Éponine's voice breaking on the last word, the crack lingering in the air. There's no answer, and Éponine takes a deep breath. “Cosette, you can't.”

“We're not children anymore,” says Cosette, absolving Éponine of being petty and cruel when she was young when she shouldn't ever forget it. “I don't know if it's love, after all this confusion and everything that went wrong. But it's something. I watched you, you know. For years. I knew how unhappy you were, and how hard you tried to at least keep those you cared for safe. I admired that even before you left, and then Gavroche spoke of you, while I was imprisoned.”

Cosette has always been braver as well as better. Éponine supposes she shouldn't be surprised, after all this time, that it should extend to this as well. She can only do her best to be as brave in return, even as she wonders what Gavroche left out when he spoke to her on their way to the throne room. “Is that why you saved me?”

“No. I would have saved you anyway. But it's why I wished I could come with you.” Cosette takes her hand, and Éponine thinks of her vision in that mirror and wonders for a sick second if that's why she's getting this, if breaking the mirror bound her. But Cosette still looks exhausted, and like perhaps she's been crying, now that Éponine looks. If she were getting all her guilty dreams, Cosette would be looking happier. “I remember your mother telling you about your birth when we were children, saying she hoped you grew up wild and fierce, and you have, even if you had to keep it pent up for too long.”

“It's not what she really wanted of me. She wanted me to give up.” Éponine lowers her eyes. “I did, too many times.”

“You didn't in the end.” Cosette squeezes her hand until Éponine looks up again. “I'm not asking for promises. You have a kingdom in your lap and I mean to help you, not add something you're not ready for.”

Éponine looks at her, the red rims around her eyes, and thinks about Fantine and Valjean and the months she spent learning and growing stronger while Cosette was shut away from the world. “Or something you're not ready for,” she says, and Cosette smiles a little but doesn't protest.

“Perhaps we aren't ready,” Cosette says, and the “we” is a relief. “But still, there's something I'd like to try.”

Cosette leans in, and Éponine meets her halfway, kisses her soft and gentle and chaste, their only other point of contact their clasped hands.

When they pull apart, they don't continue, but that's only right. They'll have time, when the bloody reminders of the price they've paid to get here aren't so close, when they've had time to talk more of when this grew between them and what they can do about it given who the two of them are.

Cosette still stands with her, holding her hand, until Éponine is ready to leave to take care of the business of the kingdom, and of the crown that everyone is sure will be placed on her head.

*

The pyres are lit not long before sunset, and the courtyard is crowded with people, some frightened, some angry, all watching Éponine's parents burn. Éponine is standing at the front of the crowd, and she was the one who held the torch to light the pyres, the conqueror securing her reign, or so the history books will no doubt say. They might not mention who made the killing blows, or her sister and brother standing at her shoulders and her other friends and allies ranged in a line behind them, cutting them off from the rest of the crowd while they mourn the parents who never would have mourned them.

She stays, though the smoke stings her eyes and the smell lingers in her nose, watching the fires burn down and down as people start to leave, in twos and threes, until it's full dark and there are only embers and her friends and family left. She turns to face them all.

She hasn't yet asked them if they'll be going back to the forest. She thinks Fantine is staying, because Cosette won't leave, and if she stays, Simplice will as well. Mabeuf and Marius she's less sure of, when Marius sometimes talks about the kingdom of his birth, but she hopes they'll stay at least a while, to advise her and help her.

“Are you ready to go in?” Gavroche asks. He looks like himself again, but there's something new in his eyes, the story of the last few months that he shrugs off whenever she or Azelma tries to ask him about it. He'll tell her someday.

“I think so.” All of them have been changed by this. Azelma is pale but sure. Cosette is standing between Valjean and Fantine, and offers Éponine a nod when she looks. Simplice seems sad, for Éponine or herself or all of them, and so does Mabeuf. Marius is tense, and may always be, but like the rest of them, he's watching, waiting for something. “Thank you all for staying,” she says, wondering if that's it.

Fantine shakes her head, but she's smiling a little. “Are you ready for everything that happens after we go in?”

Éponine won't be crowned tonight, not with her parents, the last king and queen, still burning to cinders in the courtyard, but she can't deny now that she will be crowned, that there's struggle ahead of her that she can't yet imagine. But she survived this struggle, survived it when it tried to kill her time and time again, with the help of these people. She'll survive the next, and the one after that, with their help. “Yes,” she says, and it's a lie, but less of one than it ought to be.

Lie or no, it gets everyone to start walking, and this time, Éponine follows the rest of them, throwing one last look over her shoulder at the embers, though Gavroche and Azelma are striding on ahead, that part of their lives behind them. Cosette is the one who falls back, taking Éponine's hand and holding on securely as they walk through the doors and into what comes next.


End file.
